NIEBUHR’S LECTURES
ON
ROMAN HISTORY.

Vol. I.

NIEBUHR’S LECTURES
ON
ROMAN HISTORY

Translated from the Edition of Dr. M. Isler,

By H. M. CHEPMELL, M.A., AND F. DEMMLER, Ph.D.

IN THREE VOLUMES.—VOL. I.

London:
CHATTO & WINDUS, PICCADILLY.
1875.

PREFACE.

It has been the object of the translators of this work, to give a faithful version of the original into English without any additions of their own. In so doing, they follow in the steps of the German editor, Dr. Isler, who likewise confined himself to “the purely philological task of producing a genuine text.”

Niebuhr twice delivered a course of lectures on Roman History at Bonn,—the first in the winter term of 1826-27, and the second in the winter of 1828-29, and in the following summer. In the latter of these, he went down to the fall of the Western Empire, whereas the course of 1826 was broken off at the times of Sylla, owing to his having entered rather fully into critical disquisitions.

The form in which these Lectures are here given, is that of the later course. Everything, however, that was important or interesting in the earlier series, has been inserted. Dr. Isler moreover assures us, that in his compilation, not a thought, and indeed hardly a word is to be found, which Niebuhr had not really spoken. As Niebuhr lectured quite extemporaneously, the only sources for this work are the notes taken by his hearers, several of which have been collated to ensure correctness.

Although, from the nature of things, the result cannot be looked upon as a finished and elaborate history, yet, no one who reads it can fail to be struck with its great value, even for those who are acquainted with Niebuhr’s other writings; for as Dr. Isler remarks, there are many things set forth in these Lectures more clearly, more precisely, and more at length than in the greater work. Of this, we may find examples in the introduction on the sources of Roman History, and in the account of the Saturnian verse. They also give us the last opinions of Niebuhr. The first volume of his Roman History dates most of it from the year 1826, and the additions in the third edition from 1827; but a mind like his was always active, and he went on with his investigations, even when all the leading points were settled. In several instances, fragments of ancient authors which had newly come to light, have led him to modify his views. This is particularly the case with that part of the Roman History treated in his third volume, which had been originally arranged for the press in 1812, and therefore would, if he had been spared to revise it, have undergone many qualifications.

Royal Military College, Sandhurst.

CONTENTS.

LECTURES ON ROMAN HISTORY.

INTRODUCTION.

Ancient history divides itself into the history anterior to the rule of Rome, which has many centres, and into the history of Roman rule, wherein there is but one centre, Rome, the action of which extends on all sides. Other nations, like the Egyptians, have acted by their intellectual power upon the foreigner, but were deficient in mind; others, as the barbarian nations of the Celts and other races, became important merely by the mightiness of their conquests; Greece, by her mind; but Rome combines every thing, the greatest political perfection, might, and mind. Here is an influence which has become still more lasting and ineffaceable than that of Greece: it continues to the latest centuries, even to this very day. The Roman history has to exhibit the greatest characters, achievements, and events; it is the development of the whole life of a people, the like of which is unknown in all the rest of history. Of the history of the East, as far as regards the stages of its progress, we know nothing whatever. The Egyptians we find already in castes, consequently in fixed forms, in which they abide throughout every century; they exist unalterable, of which their mummies are the emblem, and all the changes which we remark in them are a mere dying away. The Romans we see almost growing under our eyes; indeed, they also are early moulded into fixed forms, but their origin is no riddle to us. The other nations are as buds still folded up in their petals; they grow, but before they expand, they die away or only open imperfectly, as it also ever occurs with individuals, that among many thousands few only are not checked in their development. In modern history the English alone have had a career like that of the Romans. In a cosmopolitical point of view therefore, these two histories must ever remain the most important ones.

Here now the whole history of the twelve ages, which in the legend of Romulus have also been foretold as the duration of Rome, is to be set forth;—in the beginning the history of the nation and the town, then that of the empire and the aggregate of people who bore the name of Romans.

But first of all, let us make ourselves acquainted with the sources.

SOURCES OF ROMAN HISTORY.

Are the sources of the most ancient Roman history, before ever an historical literature had arisen in Rome, worthy of credit? In former times a simple honest belief was prevalent concerning this point; it would have been considered as audacity and as a crime, if any one had doubted of the Roman history, especially that which Livy drew and set forth from the sources at his command. It is now quite incomprehensible to us to what a degree very ingenious men, like Scaliger, who had far more knowledge than we, received without any hesitation the details of ancient history, deeming, for instance, the lists of the kings of Sicyon to be quite as authentic as those of the kings of France. This state of literary innocence lasted as long as all education was purely philological, and derived from books only. In the seventeenth century, when in England, France, and Germany, a new era commenced for the civilization of mankind, many began to be startled at the contradictions which some individuals might have remarked before them, but had imposed on themselves silence upon the subject,—as for instance the Roman Valla, the discovery of whose grave is one of the most pleasing remembrances of my life, and Glareanus, who thereby irritated the ingenious Sigonius, a man, however, who had not the least idea of historical criticism. The Italians were for some time a-head of the rest of Europe, then the French followed, and shortly afterwards, the Germans. As early as towards the end of the sixteenth century lived Pighius, a native of the province of Cleves, who had original ideas with regard to historical criticism, but who has commenced much and finished nothing. Then followed Perizonius’ able criticism, and then the sceptical works of Bayle and Beaufort. It was not possible in the eighteenth century to receive the Roman history with the same credulity as in the sixteenth, since the sphere of the human mind had been so much enlarged during the seventeenth. People wanted to comprehend what had happened, and how it had come to pass, and so they could no more believe in the Roman history as they found it. O that Perizonius had gone on with the work which he had begun, and had formed the conviction that he must arrive at an historical result, without which belief no man can advance and succeed;—or, that others had proceeded in his track! But he was wanting in self-confidence, and others set themselves to the work with less comprehensive powers. Beaufort, a clever man, but whose studies had not been sufficiently comprehensive, forms at this time an epoch; but his literary and personal imperfections caused him to root up the tares with the wheat. Already before had Pouilly, in the ‘Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et des belles lettres,’ set forth the same opinions, but quite crudely. It was the time of that extreme scepticism which Bayle had given birth to, and Freret had confirmed. Beaufort did not feel the necessity of a good groundwork of scientific knowledge; nevertheless he held a prominent place in his time, and exercised a marked influence upon Hooke and Fergusson, who were not capable of any deep inquiry. Yet it is remarkable that those points which Beaufort had left untouched caused scruple to no one. People made difficulties about the seven kings, the chronology, and other matters of the kind; but they would believe without knowing why, and repudiate what had a very good foundation. Such a state of things must be followed by a regular sound criticism, or there is an end of science.

Properly speaking, Livy himself to a great extent is liable to the censure of having made the earlier Roman history fall into disrepute; not merely because he sets forth much contradictory matter, but because he says himself in the beginning of the sixth book, that a new era commenced with the burning of the city by the Gauls, in which the records of the earlier times had been destroyed. This is only half true.

That in the earliest times the use of letters was already known among the Romans, and that authors might therefore have existed dating from the remotest periods, cannot be gainsayed, as we still have coins of Sybaris, the destruction of which is generally set down as having taken place four years before the expulsion of the kings. If the Greeks in Italy had letters, why should not the Romans have had them likewise? A common and easy use of them is not to be thought of previous to the introduction of the Egyptian papyrus;[1] but that writing was used in Rome very early is shown by the census, which required very extensive book-keeping. It is beyond a doubt, that before the burning by the Gauls a written law existed, the composition of which is attributed to L. Papirius under Tarquinius Superbus (according to others, Tarquinius Priscus). When Livy therefore says, per illa tempora litteræ raræ erant, this is only partly correct. Authors there were at that time none at all (by which appellation I designate those who write with a view of being read by a public). And when moreover he says of written literature, (litteræ), una custodia fidelis memoriæ rerum gestarum, he goes too far. We have parallels in the German and other histories. Among the Greeks, Polybius mentions the Chronographies, and Toichographies, Annals especially in the temples. Corresponding to these are our Annales Bertiniani, Fuldenses, and others, which commence from the seventh century, and go on through the period of the Carlovingians. They are composed of unconnected lines under the heads of the years of the different reigns, and at the side of the yearly dates the events are marked in the briefest manner, for instance, Saxones debellati. These annals also were mostly kept in churches; besides the names of the emperors, those of the bishops are usually found. After the chronicles of the empire, those of the towns arose. Thus it was among nations who in every respect were most different. Among ourselves also, family events are even now still frequently noted in our Bibles. Such annotations are most ancient, and it may safely be supposed that they existed in Rome likewise in very great numbers. When magistrates were introduced who changed every year, it became necessary to note down their names for the Fasti; for no document had legal validity unless the accurate date was affixed to it. In these Fasti they had without doubt an era a regibus exactis, the consuls being at the same time registered, and the principal events put down.

To these annals belong the Annales Maximi, more rarely called Annales Pontificum, an authentic and more comprehensive arrangement of annals, the object of which was to record every thing that was to be preserved for public memory. Cicero, de Oratore II, 12. and Servius ad Virg. Æn. I, 373, state that the chief pontiff wrote the most important events on an album which was exhibited at his residence, where probably many may have copied it, as we know of Cn. Flavius who exhibited a copy of the Fasti in the Forum. An album is a whitewashed tablet (a proof of the difficulty of the material), on this the transcript of the public documents was painted, as for example, the Edictum Prætorium and others. Now Cicero states, that the noting down of the annals had been made ab initio rerum Romanarum to the pontificate of P. Mucius; from which people wanted to conclude that the Romans in his time had had authentic annals which had gone on without interruption from the first beginning of the state. But this is by no means what Cicero says, he merely states that the noting down of events had been a usage observed from the first; that the annals had been preserved entire in his time, he does not mention any where. Vopiscus mentions, that they had been kept ad excessu Romuli, beginning therefore with Numa; but this is only the opinion of an illiterate man. The pontificate was referred to Numa, and so was therefore also the institution of the annals.

We may say with certainty, that the annals of the pontiffs for the earlier times were afterwards restored, although the belief in their genuineness might be generally received. The pontiffs were conservators of the law and of the chronology, and of course therefore also of history. But even if the original annals had only existed as far back as the expulsion of the kings, those most irreconcilable contradictions which we now find would have been impossible. Would not Fabius and others have found them out? Livy himself says, that the old records of history had perished in the Gallic conflagration. This may particularly refer to the Annales Pontificum; at that time not even the twelve tables were rescued, now could these Alba have been saved? The fact alone, that they were not found farther back induced Livy to make conclusions which were too sweeping. The chief pontiff lived below in the town, so that although the Annales Maximi were destroyed, yet many other annals (of private persons living perhaps in the Capitol, and others) might have been preserved. Thus in China, the old books were destroyed by the command of the Emperor, and those now preserved were restored from the memory of aged men, and the supplements of the astronomers with regard to the eclipses of the sun and the moon. And in the same manner, the Sibylline books, after the destruction in Sylla’s time, were made up again by collation from all quarters. According to a Jewish tradition, this applies also to some books of Holy Scripture which were restored after the destruction of the temple. In this manner we may also explain what is recorded concerning the fabled infinite antiquity of the Egyptians. The eighteenth dynasty of Manetho is historical. Before it the Hyksos were reigning, under whom old records are stated to have been lost. And yet we are told, that before this, seventeen more dynasties had existed, reference being made to such lost annals. Before Champollion’s invention of the reading of hieroglyphics, one wanted to repudiate as unhistorical every thing down to the time of Psammitichus, whereas we now know, that the age of the Hyksos forms the boundary of real history, and that every thing previous to it has been supplied afterwards. In like manner, the Annales Maximi may have been restored for the time anterior to the burning by the Gauls. A striking proof that the authentic Annales Pontificum were not preserved beyond the destruction of the city by the Gauls is afforded by the passage in Cic. R. P. I, 16, where the eclipse of the sun, which took place fifteen years before the Gallic conflagration, is spoken of. This eclipse, which was seen at Gades, was mentioned in the Annales Pontificum as an extraordinary phenomenon, and put in connexion with the passage of the Gauls over the Alps which took place nearly about the same time. Now Cicero states, that from this eclipse all the preceding ones had been calculated backwards up to the time when Romulus was snatched away from the earth.

Servius states of these annals that they had been divided into eighty books. It is to be remarked, however, that this passage of the Scholion is not found in the Codex Fuldensis, but only in several other manuscripts, the trustworthiness of which is indeed rather doubtful; yet it is not to be understood, how any one could have told stories precisely on this subject. Cicero, in the introduction to the books De legibus, says moreover concerning the Annales Maximi, quibus nihil potest esse jucundius, which is quite enigmatical. The manuscripts of the books De legibus have all of them in the fifteenth century, from the year 1420, been copied from one single manuscript. Ursinus conjectures instead of jucundius, jejunius, which indeed has much in its favour; others propose incomtius. A first-rate author, however, may sometimes easily venture upon an expression which puzzles and distracts us; and thus Cicero may have written in this passage jucundius, merely in order to designate the enjoyment which historical records of such high antiquity afford, owing to their credibility. At least we should not be justified in altering the word.

We may form a distinct idea of these annals from the passages which Livy has quoted from them at the end of the tenth book, especially where he mentions the election of the magistrates, and in the third and fourth decades. As it seems, Livy’s copy only began with the year 460 A. U. C., otherwise he would have certainly made an earlier use of it.

One point is still to be mentioned, Diomedes (III, 480) states, that the res gestæ populi Romani are (in the present tense) noted down by the pontiffs and scribes. Now authors like him are to be taken cum grano salis, but he is of some weight in so far as he had no desire to deceive, and he might have known it after all. When therefore Cicero states that the Annales had been written only as far down as to P. Mucius, a distinction must perhaps be made. In the times of P. Mucius, it may have been deemed superfluous to continue them any longer, the later acta diurna may about this time have commenced,—a sort of town gazette, which also contained the acts of the senate. The farther development of these acta diurna (afterwards diurnale, journal) together with the rise of literature is probably the cause of the Annales Pontificum having ceased. Yet similar annals may have been continued privately. The infinitely important fragment of a chronicle of Rome, by a monk of the name of Benedict, who belonged to the monastery of Soracte, discovered by Pertz,[2] contains at the time of Pope John the Eighth, annotations made quite in the old language of the annals concerning the Ostenta, which at that time were seen in Rome and the environs; that the lightning had struck the city wall; that there had been a shower of stones; and such like entries. In many monasteries the Annals of St. Jerome were continued. Every year the most remarkable events were inserted, as when an Emperor ascended the throne, &c. In this manner the expression of Diomedes may be justified.

These different annals were the only books of history from the earliest times which have been preserved among the Romans. All others mentioned by Livy, libri magistratuum, libri legum, &c. are Fasti, of which there were certainly a great number dating from the commencement of the Republic, the like of which we have still in the Fasti Capitolini and Triumphales, incomplete, even frequently falsified. These Fasti, which are still to be seen on the Capitol, where Augustus set them up, and which originated with Varro or Atticus,—the so-called Capitoline Fasti which formerly stood in the Curia Julia—contained only at the side of some detached yearly dates some memorable events. The Triumphal Fasti, which stood in the same edifice in a different place, had certainly existed from very early times. Every triumph was marked down in them, and very likely with more detail than was done in those which are preserved. The statements of Livy concerning the booty which had been made, are undoubtedly always taken from these Triumphal Fasti; but it is very remarkable that they are first found the year after that in which his extracts from the Annales Pontificum commence.

Another source of information concerning the earliest Roman history are the Commentarii Pontificum. They were a collection of law cases from the old public and ceremonial law, together with the decisions of the pontiffs in cases which came under their jurisdiction, similar to the decisions of the lawyers in the pandects. This mass was the groundwork from which those who studied the laws deduced the general principles. The Sunnah, which is the Mahomedan code of law, and the Talmud are quite corresponding to it in form. An abstract principle is never laid down: there is nothing but an enumeration of decisions in particular cases. We find the same in the Pentateuch in the discussions concerning the inheritance of females. With reference to the case of judicium perduellionis, it is stated how Horatius had slain his sister. But the groundwork of those books is nevertheless made at a different time from that which is given out in it. What we know must date from a later time, indeed still a very remote one for us, anterior to the rise of Roman historical writing, yet not so old as they themselves would have us believe.

The same was the case with the Libri Pontificum and Libri Augurales. From them the historians quote the declarations of war in that definite formula which Ancus is said first to have introduced. The forms of surrender, the formula fœderis feriendi, the appeals to the people, were according to Cicero likewise entered in them. From these books history has been enriched as much as if they had contained authentic historical facts.

Another source of the annalists were the laudationes funebres, spoken of by Livy and by Cicero in Brutus, from which latter it comes out, that very old specimens, dating as far back as from the times before the war of Pyrrhus, were in existence. They were kept in the Atrium, near the images of the ancestors (imagines). They were speeches in commemoration of a deceased person, delivered in the forum by the nearest kinsman, at first quite simple and unpretending. According to Cicero, they always returned to the family and the ancestors, that is to say, the descent of the deceased was traced from the first fathers of the race. But Cicero and Livy both complain of the falsifications which crept from these panegyrics into Roman history. The Romans, in fact, notwithstanding all the veracity which they otherwise possessed, had an extraordinary vanity with regard to political and family relations, deeming themselves bound in duty to extol their state and their families. For this reason forged victories and triumphs are contained in those laudationes.

This was the material when the first historians arose. They had besides, it is true, many laws and other documentary records; but these were a buried treasure noticed by few only. On the whole, the Romans were too careless and negligent to make use of such sources. A remarkable example of it is afforded by Livy, who, among other things, contents himself with stating, that he had heard from Augustus that there existed a certain inscription in the temple of Jupiter Feretrius,[3] without ever thinking of looking himself at it in the Capitol, where he certainly must have been often enough.

The Annals, many of which, as may have been seen, were preserved in later times, form one source of history, of which it cannot be stated at all how early it could have commenced. But this is only the skeleton of history. Besides these there is a living traditionary history. It consists of narrations which pass from the father to the children, and may be very circumstantial;—others are propagated partly by word of mouth, partly in writing, and these are the poetical traditions. Here is a field on which it will never be possible to agree, whilst looking only to one side of the question. I am convinced that great part of the early Roman history has been handed down in songs; that is to say, all that has life in it, all that has pith and meaning, and coherence. This is to me as evident a truth as any in the world. To these belongs the history of Romulus, that of Tarquinius Priscus, down to the battle near the lake Regillus, and others. The passages in Varro, and a fragment of Cato in Cicero, purporting that the Romans sang the achievements of the ancients to the flute, speak distinctly to the fact. Three inscriptions on the tombs of the Scipios are poetical, as I have shown in my Roman history. Such is moreover the story of Coriolanus, of Curtius, and others. Besides this there are without any doubt preserved in Livy detached lines from the lay of Tullius Hostilius and the Horatii. With regard to others we have not indeed any thing to bring forward, but we may here appeal to the general experience of mankind.[4]

It matters not in the least, whether the old legends were still in existence at the time when the historians wrote their works, or whether they were in verse or in prose. We may find a parallel illustration in our own (German) literature, and refer to the manifold changes which our epic poems had to undergo. The song of Hildebrand and Hadubrand, which Eckard has edited, and W. Grimm has commented upon, is of much more ancient date than the times of Charles the Great; in the tenth century there existed a Latin version of it. We are acquainted with the ‘Nibelungen’ only in that form in which they have been composed in the thirteenth century. How many phases may there not have occurred in the interval between? Then we have the much tamer version of the same subject in the ‘Book of Heroes;’ and at last that in prose of ‘Siegfried,’ which for some centuries has been in an ever renewed form in the hands of the people. Now if the ‘Nibelungen’ and all the information concerning them had been lost, and some ingenious critic recognised in ‘Siegfried’ the old poem, it would be exactly the same case as in the Roman history. The quotation of some verses from the ‘Nibelungen’ in Aventinus,[5] would then stand quite on the same footing as the three verses cited by Livy in the story of the Horatii. Such lays go for a long time side by side with history. Saxo Grammaticus has tried to change the Danish Saga into history, and on that account he cannot be brought into agreement with the statements of the Chronicles. Just so is it in Grecian history. Rhianus, in his poem on Messene, which he undoubtedly composed from old popular songs, is utterly at variance with the list of Spartan kings which Pausanias found in the old records, and with the facts which are mentioned in the contemporary strains of Tyrtæus. Then comes the time long before a literature exists, when men who have a true vocation write history; as, for instance, the author of the excellent Chronicle of Cologne. In this chronicle, which partly dates from the fifteenth century, and which might be made beautifully complete from the archives of Cologne, we find the poem of Gotfrid Hagen on the feud of the bishops, paraphrased in prose, yet with some traces of the rhyme remaining. (Here then is another example of the continual alteration of the form of old poems.) Yet if we compare this with what is stated by that very chronicle on the same subject, perhaps from church books, they can by no means be reconciled with each other. The same thing happened in the Russian Chronicles, which were continued from the time of Nestor, a monk of the eleventh century, down to a much later period, as I myself can testify from a copy in my own possession. The authors of these, as well as the writer of the Chronicle of Cologne, did not live in a literary age, and their works therefore vanished, as they did not write for the public at large. Similar chronicles had without doubt arisen in Rome also before the literature of history commenced; that is to say, before authors wrote for the Greek public, as Fabius, M. Cincius, C. Acilius did. History as a branch of literature only began when the Romans wished to make themselves known to the Greeks. Those who were not Greeks were everywhere keenly alive to the contempt which they had to suffer from the Greeks.

Cicero and Livy say that by the orations in praise of the dead history had been made fabulous. There can be no doubt of this; yet, for all that, those discourses were not a mere tissue of fables, but they were mostly documents of a very early period. This ancient time may be dated from the expulsion of the kings, that is to say, twenty-eight years before the passage of Xerxes over the Hellespont. How many literary documents of the Greeks have we not of that date? Thus in the case of the seven consulships of the Fabii, as they are told in Livy and Dionysius, in the case of the battle with the Veientines, of the story of Q. Fabius Maximus (in the last book of the first decade of Livy), the relations seem to be taken from such and similar documents; unless we choose to suppose that these stories had been fabricated with such astonishing accuracy of detail. It even seems that Fabius Maximus himself has written his own history, that at least a number of records were at hand in the accomplished Fabian family, and were carefully preserved. Of this intellectual cultivation among the Fabii, we have many proofs before us. C. Fabius Pictor, a hundred years before the war of Hannibal, created a work of art of the highest beauty; the historian wrote in Greek without being ever reproached with barbarisms in his style.

In composing history, men consulted the annals of the pontiffs, wrote out in good faith what was found in them, and put in what they found in the lays wherever they thought it would best suit, little caring whether it closely tallied or not. These different pieces were probably joined together with a greater accuracy than was done in the Chronicle of Cologne. Few only, Fabius possibly, or what is more likely, Cincius Alimentus and M. Licinius Macer first made use also of the documents in the Capitol and the old law books. The brazen law tables may have indeed been taken away by the Gauls, but there still existed other sources of law. The whole of the earlier constitution seems to have been described in the Commentarii Pontificum in law cases, from which Gracchanus took it. The groundwork of these notices is extremely worthy of credit. The march and progress of the constitution from the establishment of the Republic may be completely traced in it, with an accuracy much greater than has hitherto been possible with regard to considerable portions of medieval history.

One ought to take care not to consider the Romans previous to the time when they learned from the Greeks as barbarians. A people which in the age of the kings built those wonderful sewers; which a hundred years before the Punic wars produced the she-wolf of the Capitol; which possessed a painter like C. Fabius Pictor; which made a sarcophagus like that of Scipio Barbatus, takes certainly a high stand in mental cultivation. And such we must deem their written literature to have been, not composed in Greek forms, but endowed with beauties peculiarly its own. The grammarians knew still the moral maxims of Appius Claudius Cæcus, Cicero still read a speech of the same person against Pyrrhus. Where such writings were kept, many others also must have still existed.

The earliest work which we know of as a contemporary history is the first Punic war of Cn. Nævius, who had himself served in that contest. If concerning this greatest of all ancient wars, we had more positive accounts, such as we possess of the second Punic war, it would be better appreciated. That Nævius wrote this war in the Saturnian rhythm, that he wrote it as a poem, is characteristic of the age, a proof that ancient history was at that time familiar to the Romans in a poetical form. So it was in the oldest historical literature of the Germans with the feud of the bishops by Gotfrid Hagen, and with the poetical history of the conquest of Livonia by the Teutonic knights (which is as yet unprinted); for before the thirteenth century at least no history was written in German prose. The year in which Nævius first brought out a play on the stage is undecided. It was somewhere about the year 520; two passages in Gellius concerning it are contradictory.[6] Whether that piece, however, was the first that he had written, or whether he composed his great work yet earlier, is not mentioned by any one. Nævius was a Campanian, and it may safely be presumed that at Capua there was already a greater movement in literature than there was in Rome at the same time. The poem consisted of seven books. According to Suetonius, it was originally written continente sermone, but was divided by C. Octavius Lampadius into books, and probably also into single verses. This poem, to judge from the fragments still extant of it, was by no means deficient in poetical merit. Perhaps Servius had not read Nævius at all; he only seems to have known from older commentators that Virgil had borrowed from him the argument of his first book. Nævius treated in it of the destruction of Troy, of Dido, and Æneas. It is very natural to surmise that he also derived already the rivalry between Rome and Carthage from the faithlessness of Æneas.[7] Yet it was hardly an elaborate Roman history. It is known that Nævius by some libellous verses against the Metelli was brought into great troubles, and that he is said to have been thrown into prison. But it is enigmatical how a Roman citizen could have been thrown into prison for the publication of a liber famosus. He is said to have written two plays, whilst there. This is scarcely to be understood, when one has seen those frightful dungeons at Rome, into which no ray of light ever finds its way, and which the ancients themselves declared to be the Gates of Death. The facts may have happened in the following manner. Nævius was a Campanian, and the Campanians lost in the war of Hannibal all the benefits of their rights as citizens. Nævius, who was now friendless and helpless, must as a Campanian have been noxæ deditus to the Metelli, and have been confined, not in the public prison, but in the house of the Metelli, in a dungeon such as the Romans frequently had in their own houses for the confinement of debtors. Just as incorrect is the statement in the Chronicon of St. Jerome, that Nævius had died in the year of Cato’s era, 547 (according to Varro 549), at Utica; for as Utica was attached during the war of Hannibal to the party of Carthage, he would even as a transfuga have been very badly received there. According to Cicero, Varro placed the death of Nævius at a later period than others did. There existed therefore at that time already some uncertainty about it.

After the second Punic war, there arose several authors who wrote in the Greek language. After the Macedonian period, the Greeks began in their histories to direct their attention to the remoter nations also. This encouraged able men among such nations, who understood Greek, to write the history of their people, in order to be read by the Greeks. In Southern Italy, the Greek language had been long introduced. To maintain that the Lucanian Ocellus had really written the works attributed to him might scarcely be advisable; but some reason must nevertheless have existed for placing the authorship of them to his account, and Aristoxenus, to whom all the statements which are extant concerning this point are to be referred, was aware that these people wrote in Greek. In Campania, Apulia, and elsewhere, the native towns had Greek inscriptions and coins. The Alexandrine grammarians read Oscan histories of Italy; but these books were by no means written in the Oscan, but in the Greek language. With regard to the Roman history, there are particularly to be mentioned Q. Fabius Pictor,[8] and Cincius Alimentus, both of them very high-born Romans. The former, being of patrician family, had been sent as ambassador to Delphi. He was great-grandson of that C. Fabius Pictor, who painted the temple of Salus, a work of art which was preserved until the times of the emperor Claudius, and was most probably a battle piece representing the victory of Consul Junius over the Æqui. To him already we must give credit for having been familiar with the Greek language and manners, as the practice of painting, according to genuine Roman views, would not have been seemly for a patrician. His son was ambassador to Alexandria, and consequently likewise acquainted with Greek. The object of the historian Fabius was without doubt to combat the odious and unfair notions of the Greeks respecting the Romans. He therefore wrote the Roman history from the beginning,—whether from the arrival of Æneas we know not, but most likely from the primordia urbis. He described, as Dionysius states, the earlier times κεφαλαιωδῶς, those which were nearer to his own more circumstantially, a feature which he has in common with almost all the Roman historians except Cn. Gellius and Valerius Antias, who do just the contrary. Cato alone kept an even balance. The real subject of Fabius was the war of Hannibal; but his account of the first Punic war was also detailed. From Polybius we see, that he endeavoured in every possible way to justify his own people; that writer even taxes him with partiality for the Romans. The first history of the first Punic war had been written by Philinus, a native of Agrigentum, who was more highly exasperated against the Romans, on account of the destruction of the town of his birth. In direct opposition to him, Fabius in his writings now perhaps exaggerated in favour of the other side. Probably he wrote as far down as to the end of the second Punic war, although we have no evidence in proof, as most of the quotations from him refer to the very earliest times of Roman history. The title of his book we know not; nor do we find it mentioned anywhere, in spite of the frequent quotations, into how many books it was divided. The work was held in exceedingly high estimation, he is very often quoted by Livy and likewise by Polybius, and Diodorus Siculus; but surely we have many things from him where we do not read his name mentioned. It is evident and certain that Diodorus took Ol. 8, 1. to be the date of the building of Rome, just as Fabius did. Now Diodorus in the several years contains notices concerning Roman history, which are very much at variance with the statements of Livy, but which, although indeed very scanty, are by no means to be despised. These he can only have taken from Fabius or Timæus; but the former is more likely on account of the accordance just alluded to. Appian, on the occasion of the embassy to Delphi, mentions Fabius, ὃς τόνδε τὸν πόλεμον ξυνέγραψε; and he too certainly has borrowed from him. Appian was very little conversant with Latin, and had not the least research; where Dionysius of Halicarnassus went before him he closely followed his track, just as Zonaras did with regard to Dio Cassius. Fabius Pictor had likewise written in Greek, (Dion. Hal. V proœm.), so that Appian could read him. Now he also agrees in a remarkable manner with Zonaras, who follows in the wake of Dio Cassius, whose keen glance recognised Fabius as the best authority. We owe therefore to Fabius an immense debt of gratitude for the most precious and invaluable information. And certainly the careful language used concerning the earlier constitution by Dio Cassius, who consistently calls populus δῆμος, and plebs ὅμιλος or πλῆθος, is derived from Fabius. Thus Fabius not only is the father of Roman history, but in him also is found the highest and most perfect knowledge of the ancient constitution. Censorious people have railed at the idea that we in the nineteenth century should pretend to understand the Roman constitution better than Livy and Dionysius did; yet we do not presume to understand it differently from the consular Dio Cassius, and Q. Fabius from whom he has borrowed.

With reference to Fabius, there is great and insurmountable difficulty belonging to literary history in the manner in which Cicero de Divinat. I, 21 speaks of him, where he mentions somnium Æneæ ex Numerii Fabii Pictoris græcis annalibus. This Numerius Fabius Pictor reappears in no other place. The prænomen of Quintus Fabius Pictor is a point quite settled, as it occurs in too many authors; but at that period several wrote in Greek, so that there may possibly have been also a Numerius Fabius Pictor. Cn. Aufidius, whom Cicero speaks of, is likewise quite unknown. As it happens, the books De Divinatione have only come down to us in bad manuscripts, which are all derived from one single copy now lost, yet we should certainly not be warranted in supposing this prænomen in particular to be falsified. Yet in his treatise De Orat. II, 12 and in the beginning of the first book De Legibus, Cicero speaks of a certain Pictor as of a Latin author of Annals, and places him between Cato and Piso. This person is also quoted by no one else; but Gellius V, 4, cites Annales Fabii without any cognomen. A writer of the name of Pictor,[9] de Jure Pontificio, is met with in Macrobius; but these books are foreign to history. Perhaps Cicero made a mistake. There was another annalist, Fabius Maximus Servilianus, who was an author of note according to Dionysius, who mentions him after Cato. Servius also cites him. He lived just in the period between Cato and Piso. His book was entitled Q. Fabii Annales. Cicero had an extreme dislike to the old annalists, he had in all probability hardly read any besides Cato, at least not since his youth. Now in all likelihood he calls that Fabius erroneously Pictor. In dictating especially, such a mistake may occur. That Cicero was little versed in Roman history is proved by the delusion to which he recurs more than once, that Decius the grandson had sacrificed himself like his grandfather and his father.[10] Cicero is particularly incorrect sometimes with regard to the prænomens, as for instance, contrary to every other writer, he calls the father of Virginia Decimus Virginius. The prænomen Numerius was moreover very common in the Fabian family, so that it might have been more familiar to Cicero. Lastly, Diodorus mentions the same dream of Æneas, which Cicero treats of in other places, as being taken from Q. Fabius (Diod. fragm. ap. Syncell.). In Korte’s edition of Sallust, the fragments of Fabius Pictor are thrown together with those of Fabius Servilianus.

Contemporary with Fabius was the other Roman, of whom we know from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, that he wrote the Roman history in Greek; and it is a very instructive fact, in forming an idea of these accounts, that without Dionysius we should not have known that Cincius had written the Roman history in Greek. From Livy we should only have been able to gather that he had written about the war of Hannibal. He was a senator and prætor in the second Punic war, and was made a prisoner in the beginning of the struggle. We see on this occasion, that he must have been a very distinguished personage; as the Roman laws were very strict in that war against those who allowed themselves to be made prisoners, and he nevertheless attained to high and honourable offices. He relates, that Hannibal had entered into conversation with him, and given him an account of his passage over the Alps; a proof as well of his personal consequence, as of the circumstance that he could speak Greek, since Hannibal in the beginning of the war did not yet speak Latin. He is called by Livy Maximus Auctor, and his statement cited by the latter as decisive. His works De Potestate Consulum, and on the Roman Calendar, he wrote in Latin; as to his identity there cannot be the least doubt. From Dionysius we see that he had peculiar views with regard to Roman antiquities. He made researches concerning the monuments of ancient times, even in Etruria, thereby forming an exception to the most of the Romans. What Dionysius has taken from him, cannot be known for certain. A fragment of his in Festus, throws especial light on the relations between the Romans and Latins.

Likewise in Greek, only a little later (after 570), C. Acilius writes Roman annals down to the war with Antiochus. He is quoted for the Myth of Romulus; and by Dionysius with reference to the restoration of the sewers. His work was translated into Latin by a certain Claudius; he too seems to have been a very estimable writer.

Some more Romans afterwards wrote in Greek; it is, however, uncertain, whether the whole of the history, or merely memoirs of their time. There are mentioned A. Postumius Albinus, a contemporary of the elder Cato (about 600); and Cn. Aufidius, a contemporary of Cicero in his youth.

It was soon afterwards, towards the beginning of the war with Perseus, that Q. Ennius composed his Annals. The denomination of annals is a strange one, quite ill suited to a poem. Ennius was by far too poetical to write down history year by year. His poem was the first real imitation of the Greek model: the earlier ones of Nævius were still in the old lyric style. We are able to gain a general view of the work in the fragments; if the older quotations were only somewhat more trustworthy in the numbers, the whole of its argument might be restored. So much is certain, that the oldest times of the Trojan arrival and of the kings were contained in the three first books; and the quotation may also be pretty sure, that the war of Pyrrhus had been the subject of the fifth book.[11] He occupied himself little with the domestic struggles; and would probably speak of the wars only, according to the notions of epic poetry which were then entertained. The 225 years between were therefore contained in one book; the wars against the Samnites perhaps only in a slight sketch. The first Punic war, as Cicero tells us, he altogether left out, because Nævius had sung it; that of Hannibal he treated with the utmost prolixity, so that it must have begun already in the seventh book, and have been still continuing in the twelfth. In the thirteenth book, the subject was the war with Antiochus; in the fifteenth, the Istrian; so that the last six books only extended over twenty-four years. There were in all eighteen books. Of Scipio, and of M. Fulvius Nobilior, he sung the praises with peculiar richness of detail. The latter he accompanies into the Ætolian war. He was born in 513, according to Cato’s chronology, and died 583, continuing his poem almost to the time of his death.

The sources of Ennius for the earliest times were the Annales Maximi; for the times of the kings, the old lays, and the Commentarii Pontificum; in the middle times, Timæus, Hieronymus, Fabius; in the last years, he was a cotemporary. He is to be blamed for his vanity, since he placed himself on a level with Homer; and for his bad hexameters. One cannot but be annoyed at his speaking in a disparaging tone of the old poems. On the other hand, however, there are fragments extant of his, which bespeak a true poetical spirit. He had some similarity to Klopstock, who like him despised the ancient forms, without knowing the Greek ones sufficiently to distinguish himself in them. It may be presumed that it was he from whom Livy took his noble description of the time of the kings.

As to the assertion, that the division of his books had originated with Q. Vargunteius, a positive denial may be given to it. Suetonius only states, that Vargunteius had critically reviewed the books of Ennius, as Lampadio did Nævius.

The fragments of Ennius have been collected by several; with much minuteness by Hieronymus Columna, at the end of the sixteenth century, accompanied by a commentary which, although prolix, is very instructive. Some verses in it are taken from Claudius Sacerdos, who is still lying in manuscript at Vienna.[12] Soon after him, a Netherlander, Paul Merula, edited them anew in a different order, and with many additions. Among the latter there are some verses which Columna had overlooked. But Merula says that he had a great number of verses from L. Calpurnius Piso De Continentia Veterum Poetarum, in which the older poets were compared with those of his own time (that of Pliny), and the latter also among themselves; that the manuscript was in the library of S. Victor in Paris; that he was however afraid of its not being safe there. This is altogether strange. Another statement is that the manuscript had been bound together with a copy of Lucan, and had afterwards been cut out. Indeed such a copy of Lucan exists still in Paris, where Bekker has seen it; yet this proves very little after all. It is possible that in this Merula has committed a fraud, which is quite in the manner of his time. The detached verses which he quotes from Nævius and Ennius, are to my belief suspicious without exception. Those from Nævius are decidedly spurious; for in their case, he was ignorant of the rhythm. The verses of Ennius are hexameters; but they nowhere bear the stamp of genuineness, like his other fragments. Why has not Merula copied and edited that MS., if indeed he entertained any misgivings that it might be purloined?

Not long after the time of Ennius, whom we rightly reckon among the Roman historians, Roman history began to be written in Latin prose; and the first work of this kind was the most important which has ever been composed on the history of ancient Italy, viz. the Origines of the elder Cato. They show that Cato had indeed found out the only right way of treating Roman history. He wrote not the history of the Romans only, but also that of Italy. As he described the widening the Roman sway in Italy, he seems to have told the history of each Italic people separately. We know from Nepos the plan of his seven books. In the first, there was the history of the kings; in the second and third, the subjugation of Italy; in the fourth book, the first, and in the fifth, the second Punic war; in the sixth and seventh, the later wars down to the time with which he concluded. Cato was a great man in every respect, he rose far above his age. Of his work we have many detached quotations; but of real extracts we have only one in Gellius, viz. the passage of the Tribune Q. Cædicius, which is from the second Punic war, and consequently belongs to the fourth book. It shows Cato’s peculiar manner of writing; and we understand from it why Cicero, who on the whole vacillates between praise and censure with regard to Cato, distinguishes him above all his contemporaries. He wrote about the year 600. In Livy there is a strange anachronism in the discussions about the lex Oppia, when, in the year 561, the tribune cites against Cato his Origines. But so slavish was formerly the belief in Livy, that the most positive information was less considered than that passage. Gerh. Jo. Vossius is the first who points out that Livy was here most likely rather speaking himself. What we have from the work of Cato is unfortunately very little, but all of it excellent. This book and that of Fabius are by far the most important accounts which we might wish for Roman history. His work stands alone in the whole collection of Roman annals.

A short time after Cato, about the time of the destruction of Carthage, the history of Rome was written by L. Cassius Hemina, of whose work we have historical quotations in the Grammarians. Several writers call him antiquissimus auctor, which is not said of Piso and others. He had concerning Alba still the old native chronology: the earlier times of Rome he made to synchronize with Grecian history. He began from the very earliest times; and, what was indeed quite different from all the annalists, from before the foundation of the city. One finds of him several things concerning the Sicilian towns in Latium; from whence it would appear that the archæology of the towns was his principal object. As to his style we may form an idea of it from a single larger fragment: it is worse than that of Cato. The fourth book, according to Priscian, had for its title Bellum Punicum Posterior; consequently at the time when he wrote the third war had not yet begun. The secular festival, 607 according to Varro, he has indeed mentioned; yet it may have been quite at the end of his work. We must not, however, believe that his history consisted of four books only; as the whole of the fourth was taken up by the second Punic war, and thus there must have been at the very least five or six of them.

From that time, history was written repeatedly, and therefore no original way of treating the subject is any more to be thought of. The Rhetores Latini have surely made use of the books which then existed, and have besides consulted the ancient annals. How far this may have been the case with each of them in particular is indeed no more to be decided; but on the whole we shall not be mistaken in this supposition. It is in this time that the Fabius Pictor is to be placed, whom Cicero mentions in his work—de Oratore. He was a learned writer: his work entitled Res Gestæ, seems to have been very diffuse, as it mentions the burning of the city by the Gauls in the fourth book; yet the number of the books is unknown. No fragment of any import has been preserved of it. His name was Servius, or perhaps Sextus; for in the Brutus of Cicero Ser. Fulvius, and then Ser. Fabius is spoken of, whom he terms juris pontificii peritissimus. Yet the books de Oratore and Brutus, which seem to have such an excellent text, are corrupted in many little passages, which a clever copyist of the sixteenth century furbished up. Of the books de Oratore, only one old manuscript has been found in Milan, which is particularly indistinct. The Brutus does not fare better: none of the manuscripts date higher than 1430. There is therefore much doubt about the names in these books. A MS. at Heidelberg has Serius Fabius, and it is probable that it ought to be Sextus, as the prænomen Servius is unheard of in the family of the Fabii. Perhaps this Pictor is the same as he who in a fragment quoted is called Fabius Maximus Servilianus, since he at least belonged to that time. The fragment refers to the arrival of Æneas.

Here I also mention the tedious Cn. Gellius, a credulous, uncritical, and second-rate writer. The time when he lived is uncertain. Vossius conjectures that he is the very same against whom Cato the Censor made a speech; but we have fragments of his which do not seem to tally with such an early period. Much rather should he be placed in the second half of the seventh century; partly on account of his style, and partly because he already criticizes, and tries to make the improbabilities of the old tradition more credible by small but dishonest alterations. The numbers of his books, as they were quoted, betoken an immense prolixity. Charisius cites the ninety-seventh book, and that distinctly written in full letters in the Neapolitan original Codex. Other citations do not go beyond the thirtieth book.

Cicero mentions after Pictor an annalist, Vennonius, of whom we have only one passage in Dionysius, referring to the history of the kings. He therefore most likely wrote annals from the building of the city. In that fragment, he shows himself to be a man without judgment; which also corresponds with Cicero’s unfavourable opinion of his manner of writing.

An author whose period we cannot fix with certainty, is L. Calpurnius Piso Frugi Censorius, an opponent of C. Gracchus, a supporter of the aristocratical party, but an honest one. The time of his censorship occurs between the tribunates of the two Gracchi, and he may have written his history not long afterwards. He has quite a peculiar character. He wished to bring the old historical matter, which his predecessors unconcernedly rendered just as they found it in ancient poems and Fasti, into the consistency of an actual possibility, and thus to fashion out a true history by cutting off the improbabilities. He finds, for instance, that Tarquinius Superbus could not possibly have been the son of Tarquinius Priscus; and so without any further ado, he makes him at once his grandson. He is also startled at the fact of Tarpeia’s having had a tomb on the Capitol; not considering that she was a Sabine heroine to whom such a tomb had been erected on the Capitol,[13] as Tatius had a monument on another hill. He is therefore the original author of all those falsifications,—a sad prosy undertaking which Cn. Gellius also has entered into. That magnificent story of Curtius he explains thus, that a warrior with his charger had been swallowed up in a gulf on the same spot, which could only have happened when Romulus and Tatius were waging war against each other; and that Curtius must therefore have been a Sabine general. It does not occur to him, that a whole army cannot find a footing in a place where the general sinks down. In the same spirit, it has once been attempted to change the northern Sagas into history; and there were people who affected to see in the struggle of the Nibelungen an historical war of the Burgundians. A similar course was adopted forty or fifty years ago with regard to the interpretation of the New Testament. The title of Piso’s book was Annales. He was a plodding man; for it is to be seen that he has made use of sources like the Fasti and such like. The number of his books is undecided. In his third book, he treats of Cn. Flavius (450); in the seventh, of the year 516. He came down to his own times, since he mentions the Secular Games of the year 607.

In the course of the same century, several historical books were written. I do not, however, mean to speak here of those who merely composed a history of their own time, but of such only who wrote the entire Roman history. Among these, there were in Cicero’s youth, about the period when the books ad Herennium were written, 680, or rather about the date of Cicero’s consulship, two who wrote a general Roman history, Q. Claudius Quadrigarius, and Q. Valerius Antias. Both of them, according to Velleius, are later than Cœlius Antipater and than the older contemporaries of Sisenna. They wrote after the time of Sylla. Quadrigarius belongs to those authors who, in later times, after the restoration of the older literature, were frequently read. He forms, as did Cassius Hemina, an exception to the general rule, according to which the annalists commenced from the building of the city. Whilst the latter went yet much farther back than this, Claudius began his history with the destruction of the city by the Gauls. We have of him some considerable fragments from which this is evident. For, in the numerous fragments of his first book, much is told of the Gallic war; likewise the beginning of the war against the Samnites,—we have even the battle near Caudium; one of them alludes to the end of the third Samnite war; and all this not cursorily. As therefore he comprehended in it a period so ample and rich in incidents, he could not have had room for the older history. Another argument for our assertion, is a statement of Plutarch, that a certain Clodius (Kλώδιος) said that nothing whatever could be grounded upon the older Roman accounts; as owing to the calamitous invasion, the old documents had been destroyed, and all that remained was merely the production of family vanity. In the second, or third book, he speaks of Pyrrhus; in the fifth and sixth, of Hannibal; in the eighth, of Tiberius Gracchus the father; in the thirteenth, of Metellus; in the nineteenth, of Marius: there are quotations from him as far as the twenty-third book. His history was brought down to about the time of Cicero’s consulship. Fragments, in which we may clearly recognise the unwieldiness of language of these old annalists in general, in whose writings regularly constructed periods[14] are not yet at all to be thought of, are found in Gellius; and they fully justify Cicero’s opinion with regard to the old writers. The Chronicles of Cologne and Limburg are for the most part much better written. Little was therefore read of Roman prose writers before Sallust and Livy. Gellius finds the old writers pleasant; which may be accounted for by the fact that the taste of his time was completely palled, so that it now betook itself to highly spiced dishes, and then to ice. Let only the fragment of Claudius in Gellius[15] be consulted. The golden age of Roman literature was certainly under Augustus, as that of the French was in the days of Louis XIV.; but precisely because this was its first blossom, the thoughts and ideas were more simple, the language more calm, and in some respects having greater breadth and fulness. Afterwards spirit rather, and wit, were called forth into existence; every thing was required to be expressed, and was expressed, in more terse, polished, and pointed language. Thus the time down to Tacitus was like the age of Louis XV. in France. But now, when the Romans carried every thing to the highest pitch, this manner of thinking and writing was also overstrained: it was still to be made more and more pointed, more polished, and more witty; and then they reached that extreme which borders very closely upon what is absolutely spiritless and insipid. At this period lived Gellius, a very clever man, who was so tired of this tendency of his age, that he had no more feeling for the better literature preceding it, and turned to the earliest times, in which he found a relish.

Valerius Antias is of all the Roman historians certainly the most untrue, the only one who can be directly taxed with falsehood. Livy says of him, adeo mentiendi nullus modus est, and si Valerio Antiati credere libet. He knows the most circumstantial details of the old times, and is always inclined to exaggerate without bounds, especially with regard to numbers. His fictions have a character quite different from the older ones. The numbers of the latter are not at all meant to deceive any one; they merely mention a number (e. g. sexcenti, μύριοι, ter centum tonat ore deus in Virgil,) in order to denote an indefinite quantity. This poetical mingling of what is definite with what is seemingly indefinite, every where pervades the Roman legends. Thus the thirty Sabine maidens are in fact no definite number, but an equivalent to many. Valerius Antias, for his part, has five hundred and forty-seven. Thus he has written an immense huge work, in the latter portion of which especially he becomes quite prolix; nevertheless he has not been able to compose a circumstantial and lively narrative, but has drily recorded the detached incidents. He is cited as far as the seventy-fifth book. In the second, he mentions Numa; and in the twelfth, the tribune Tib. Gracchus. Fragments, from which we might judge of his style, are not extant.

One might be inclined to take this Valerius for a gentilis of the Maximi and Poplicolæ. He might have been so in the widest sense; but he did not belong to the gens of the patrician Valerii. In the war of Hannibal, one meets with a L. Valerius Antias, who probably was a citizen of Antium. From him our annalist may have descended.

It is strange, that although Livy himself repeatedly acknowledges the untrustworthiness of Valerius Antias, there are nevertheless in his own first book some passages which he can only have taken from him.

All these authors had still something old-fashioned in their manner, and stood in the same relation to the later ones as the German writers in the beginning of the eighteenth century did to those who came out at the time of the seven years’ war.

Towards the end of the seventh century, after all these authors, who were very much of the same cast, there appeared C. Licinius Macer,—the father of the orator and poet Calvus, who flourished at the same period as Catullus, about the year 700,—a distinguished and original writer. His tribunate dates about 680, before Pompey’s first consulate. Of the character of his works, we may form a sufficient estimate from the quotations in Livy and Dionysius. He did what only two before him had done; he wrote history from documents, and may have retained much belonging to those times, which the later writers have left out, because it did not agree with the idea which they had formed, and with the generally received statements in the Fasti and elsewhere. Pliny frequently mentions him among his sources; and certainly the treaty of Porsena with the Romans, which we read in Pliny, was taken from him. In the introduction to the books de Legibus, Cicero speaks unfavourably of him; and he may have partly been justified in asserting that as an author he had by no means deserved the praise which is due to him as a critic. When we Germans praise Mascov[16] as the first who has written a history of Germany, we do not mean by it to assert that his work was a perfect history. Yet Cicero perhaps gave an unfavourable judgment for this reason also, that Macer and he belonged to different political parties; Macer having had a considerable share in the restoration of the tribunician power. The State had at that time lost its soundness, and was in that condition, in which people see the lesser evil to be on one of the two sides, very much as is now the case in France (1828). The loss of the history of Macer is very highly to be regretted. A speech in the fragments of Sallust’s History shows an accurate knowledge of the old constitution, which Sallust cannot be given credit for. He is quoted to the sixteenth book. How many books he has written is undecided: he may have begun from the earliest times, and he probably went on as far as his own.

An historian of the old constitution is Junius Gracchanus, a friend of C. Gracchus, which accounts for his cognomen. Gracchus exercised a marked influence upon many, and especially on younger men. Both of the brothers were men of a deeply earnest heart. Gracchanus has written the history of the constitution; and, quoting the yearly dates, has given a description of the changes which it had undergone. He is often cited in the law books, in Ulpian, in Censorinus, in Tacitus, and elsewhere. The era of the beginning of the consulship, which is particularly used by Lydus de Magistratibus, who has derived it from Gaius’ commentary on the twelve tables, originates undeniably with Gracchanus.[17] He has drawn from the most authentic sources, and is deserving of unlimited confidence, as I can assert with the firmest conviction.

Of Fenestella nothing is quoted that refers to the earlier ages: it seems therefore that he did not treat of Roman history in its full extent.

Among the Scriptores Minores Rerum Romanarum, there is a book, Origo Gentis Romanæ, attributed to Victor. In this most of the earlier annalists are quoted; also the Annales Maximi (even for the settling of Æneas), Sextus Gellius, Domitius, Egnatius, M. Octavius; and authors besides, who occur nowhere else. Andreas Schottus has first edited it. From the similarity of the book to the writings of Fulgentius, of the Scholiast on Ibis, and other commentators of the time, who likewise cite known and unknown writers, one might be induced to place the author in the same period, namely, the fifth or sixth century. But the whole of the book is a fabrication of more modern times; not by Schottus himself, but by a forger, of whom indeed there were so many towards the end of the fifteenth century. Messala also, Fenestella De Magistratibus, and others in that collection, date from the same period. Octavius may have been got at second hand by the author from the Scholiast of Horace; and Sextus Gellius from Dionysius, who says, “I write, what the Gellii and others have written.” The quotations from Cato in this book are in direct contradiction to the most positive evidence which we have with regard to Cato in Servius and others.

This was the state of Roman history in the time of Cicero. During Cæsar’s stay in Gaul, Q. Ælius Tubero, a friend of Cicero, wrote the Roman annals anew. He was with Q. Cicero as legate in Asia; he belonged to the party of the Optimates, and was a very honest man. Livy cites his history from the earliest times. What is quoted of him, gives an impression of his respectability as a historian; though it is evident from it, that he no longer knew the old style of language, and that he did not see the difference between the institutions of his own day and those of primitive times. He too made use of documents; but he was not to be compared with Macer in importance, unless he has been wronged by those who are our authorities.

Atticus’ annals seem to have been only tables; but a very valuable work. Quotations, however, from them we read nowhere; so that we may infer, that in all likelihood there were many such books of which we know nothing.[18]

In that introduction of wondrous beauty to his books De Legibus, Cicero speaks of having been asked to write the Roman history, as a duty the fulfilment of which his country expected from him. He expresses himself on the subject in such a manner, as clearly to show that he would certainly have liked the work, but that indeed he had never thought of it in right earnest. Had he done so, we may, without losing sight of the reverence due to so great a man, assert, that he would have taken upon himself a task for which he was quite unsuited. From the books De Republica, we see with how incredibly little previous reading he set about the description of the constitution. He seems not to have made any use of Gracchanus; but to have derived his knowledge chiefly from Polybius, and perhaps from Atticus. His proper calling was that of a statesman, and not of a scholar.

Many authors are yet to be mentioned; Antipater, Fannius, Polybius, Posidonius, Rutilius, Lucullus, Scaurus, and others, part of whom have written in Greek.[19]

Sallust found the Roman history in a neglected state; he expresses himself to that effect in his Catiline, and says, that it would be a task for a man, who had the capacity for writing it. And he would have had the capacity; but the Romans had no more a Roman history than we have a German one. Sallust was a busy practical man, who would not, and could not devote his life to the immense preparatory studies, which were required for it. He therefore wisely chose to write detached parts of Roman history, which were perhaps intended at a future period to form a whole. Thus he wrote the history of Jugurtha, in which it was his main object to point out to his readers the reaction in favour of the crushed popular party against the aristocrats, who had so shamefully abused their victory. He therefore is careful to show how Rome then in every respect was full of rottenness within. His histories began from the time after Sylla’s death, and described the revolution against Sylla’s ill-judged counter-revolution, and the struggle of Sertorius. Catiline’s conspiracy is to prove, what consummate ruffians, after all, those partisans of Sylla were, who called themselves the optimates, the boni.

Between the time of Jugurtha and the consulate of Lepidus, the historical work of Sisenna formed the connecting link. With this Sallust no doubt was satisfied; otherwise he would have treated also of that period.

The great change in the Roman world under Augustus had taken place; the history of the republic was brought to a close. It was believed that nothing more was to be hoped from constitutional forms and their development, but that the great mass of the state was to be kept together by outward force. After such a catastrophe, history appears altogether in a different light, and is written in a different spirit. In these times, just as in Greece after the downfall of the Athenian state, many historians come forth before the public. After Cæsar’s death, Diodorus Siculus wrote, to whom the Roman history is merely a secondary affair. It is probable, that Timæus also in his history of Italy and Sicily had interwoven the Roman one; though not beyond a very early period. Diodorus had the idea, which none but a prosaic mind could have conceived, of writing the whole of ancient history in synchronistical order; first in large periods, and then year by year, down to the consulate of Cæsar, when the latter commenced the Gallic war. He concludes before the civil war, in order to avoid the offence, which he might have given by his narration to one or the other of the two parties. And it was besides a very convenient break; as in all probability he wrote his work before the conclusion of the troubles. That he composed his history after the death of Cæsar, is evident from the introduction, in which he mentions that event, and calls Cæsar Divus. Scaliger had the unfortunate idea of arguing from the passage I, 68 that Diodorus had written as late as 746, that therefore he had left off fifty years before his own time. This opinion passed from Scaliger into the work of Vossius De Historicis Græcis et Latinis, and from the latter into the Bibliotheca Græca of Fabricius. That passage states concerning the Olympiads, that these were a period of four years which the Romans called bissextum; and from this Scaliger infers, that he could not have written before 746, because at that time Augustus had fixed the intercalatio at four years. This interpretation is most ingenious; but the passage is an interpolation, as some of the earlier and all the later commentators have remarked, so that Wesseling entirely expunges it from the text. The term χρόνος for year, which occurs there, is modern Greek; just as tempus instead of annus is met with after the fifth century. Diodorus is an author whose writings have been falsified. These forgeries were made in the age of the restoration of literature, when manuscripts were much sought after, and dearly paid for. There are for the most part omissions; and from the eleventh to the twentieth book he now and then gives fasti, which do not in the least agree with those which we have. The names in them are often not to be recognised at all. All his accounts of the earliest times he probably had from Fabius. Where Polybius begins, he may have made use of him down to the year 608; and he may also have had Posidonius, Rutilius, Sylla and Lucullus.

We now come to the two great authors, who were contemporary writers of Roman history. Dionysius of Halicarnassus in his introduction gives a full account of his circumstances and his works. He came to Rome after the conclusion of the civil wars, and published his history, 743 according to Cato, (745 according to Varro). He calls himself the son of Alexander of Halicarnassus, and was a rhetorician. His rhetorical writings belong to the earlier time of his life. These are of all the Greek rhetorical works the most excellent, those of Aristotle alone excepted. They are full of fine remarks, and are the produce of an amiable mind and an exquisite taste: it is only a pity that they should have been handed down in such a corrupt state. He is very likely to be the same person whom Strabo[20] mentions under the name of Cæcilius. We cannot wonder at this; for if he obtained the Roman citizenship, he was obliged to assume the name of a Roman gens. It can hardly mean Atticus, who indeed, but extremely seldom, is called by the name of Cæcilius. In the lives also of the ten orators, which are found among Plutarch’s Biographies, the name of Cæcilius occurs, which some took to be that of the quæstor Cæcilius, who was in Sicily under Verres, but which seems likewise to mean Dionysius; for all that is quoted of him we find in Dionysius. It is true, that the facts, which we now read in Dionysius, may also have been contained in others; yet the supposition, which we have put forth, is a very probable one, as indeed Josephus also is frequently called Flavius.

His history comprises, in twenty books, the period from the earliest times to the beginning of the first Punic war. It does not go further, either because Polybius,—for whom he has, however, no particular liking,—begins with that period, or because the much-read history of Fabius rises here into greater importance. The first ten books are complete; the eleventh is in a very corrupt state. Extracts from the others are found in the collections of Constantinus Porphyrogenitus De Virtutibus et Vitiis, and De Legationibus; and also in a collection ἐκλογαὶ Διονυσίου τοῦ Ἁλικαρνασσέως, which is met with in several libraries, but is dreadfully mutilated. Mai has published them from a Milanese manuscript; Montfaucon had already directed attention to them. I respect and acknowledge the merits of Mai; but he has an unfortunate vanity, and thus I believe, that he has intentionally foreborn to mention, that here he has been led into the right path by Montfaucon, conduct for which he has been taken to task by Ciampi. Yet this is merely a secondary question. The collection itself mostly consists of unconnected sentences, remnants perhaps of books of Const. Porphyrogenitus, which have not come down to us. The advantage gained from this discovery is at all events very considerable. Dionysius himself had made an abridgment of his work in five books, to which Mai quite wrongly wants to have those extracts referred. As to the first ten books, there are more very old manuscripts of them extant than of any other ancient author. The Chigi manuscript is of the tenth, that of the Vatican of the eleventh century; the former is kept by Fea locked up from all visitors,—it has been imperfectly collated by Amati, but the result has never been published, nor would he sell it to me; the Vatican codex has been made use of by Hudson. The eleventh book is only to be found in copies which are quite modern. Ever since the old books were no more written on rolls, those which were voluminous had stated divisions. Thus the Pandects, the Theodosian Code, Livy also, were originally divided into decades; and in all likelihood Dionysius too. Of these, the first volume has been preserved entire. Of the second, a copy very probably long existed;—Photius was acquainted with it still;—yet only a few leaves of it have come into the hands of the first Greek copyists. The text is much more corrupt than that of the first half.

Dionysius was first printed by Robert Stephens, and indeed from a very bad manuscript. He had already before that been generally read in a Latin translation. A Florentine, Lapus[21] Biragus, translated him from a very good manuscript, probably a Roman one, in the time of Pope Sextus IV., who has done very great services to ancient literature. But Lapus was a bungling translator, with a very scanty knowledge of Greek; as also were Petrus Candidus, Raphael Volaterranus, Leonardus Aretinus. But the works of these men were much read; and to us they are of importance, because they represent the manuscripts which they made use of.[22] Sylburg has very judiciously used the translation of Lapus. It agrees almost throughout with the Vatican manuscript. H. Glareanus revised again the version of Lapus, and, as he states, corrected it in six thousand places. He likewise availed himself of a manuscript. S. Gelenius of Cologne made a new translation, and one far better than those of his predecessors. He too may serve as a manuscript. Now was the text itself first published. The second edition is that of Sylburg, 1586, one of the most excellent elucidations of an ancient author any where to be found. He had, as it seems, an incomplete collation of the Venetian manuscript; but beside that the translations only. It is a pity that Sylburg should not have restored the text, with the means which he possessed in his apparatus, and in his eminent talent for conjecturing. The annotations are done in a masterly style; and added to this moreover was the double work of a matchless philological index, and of an historical one almost as perfect. No editor has done as much for his author as Sylburg did for Dionysius. Sylburg is not yet sufficiently appreciated. This work, his Etymologicum Magnum, his Pausanias, his Clement of Alexandria, bear evidence that in the faculty of conjecturing, and in profound knowledge of the language, he was not inferior to any one philologian of the first renown, not even to J. Fr. Gronovius himself. He has contributed much to the Thesaurus of Henry Stephens. Particularly important, besides, is his edition and translation of the Syntaxis of Apollonius. His edition of Dionysius, which was published by Wechel at Frankfort, is rare. A reprint of it was made at Leipsic 1691. After Sylburg follows Hudson’s edition, 1704. Hudson was a friend of Dodwell, and passed in England for an eminent philologian. Bentley was at that time run down, as being a Whig; and therefore the whole University of Oxford had conspired against him, and opposed to him Hudson, whom they lauded as a great classical scholar. But Hudson was a sad bungler. He has not done the least thing for his Geographi Græci Minores, just as Reiz did nothing for Lucian. Hudson had a collation of the excellent Vatican Codex of Dionysius, which is in the notes, but of which he made no use at all. The edition is beautifully printed. Sylburg’s annotations are for the most part not given, or else mutilated. But the book enjoyed some fame in Germany, and a bookseller of Leipsic had it reprinted. When the first volume was nearly finished, the publisher applied for the correction of the proof sheets to Reiske. The latter was a friend of my father, and I have a high regard for him; but I am not blind to his defects for all that. His mind was extremely versatile, he had an admirable talent for conjecture; but he was too hasty. He had previously only read Dionysius once; whilst correcting, he inserted into the text readings from the Vatican manuscript, sometimes also his own emendations, of which he gives an account at the conclusion. Yet they are often very unhappy, although now and then very spirited. In Grimme’s Synopsis nothing has been done for criticism. If I could get a collation of the Chigi manuscript, I might perhaps undertake some day to make a critical edition of Dionysius.

It prepossesses us in favour of Dionysius, who shows himself in his rhetorical writings to have been a man of fine judgment, that, as he tells us, he had devoted twenty-two years to that work; that he had learned the Latin language, and made researches into the annals. His history, which now reaches down only a little beyond the time of the decemvirs, extended, as already observed, to the beginning of the first Punic war; at which period Timæus also left off, and Polybius began. He was befriended by many distinguished Romans, and wrote with a true veneration for the greatness of the Roman people. The name of Archæology appears new in him. When we see that his history does not give in eleven books more than Livy’s does in three; that he takes up a whole book with what happened before the building of the city, and treats of the earliest times so much at length; this prolixity excites our mistrust not only of the credibility, but also of the judgment of the author. As far as regards this point, it is not to be denied that Dionysius has chosen a plan of which we cannot approve. Not to mention that he looks upon the time of the kings as historical, he made a mistake when he undertook to treat history pragmatically from the very earliest times. Yet the more carefully we examine the work, the more worthy of respect Dionysius appears to us, and the more we find his book to be a treasury of the most sterling information. As such it has been first acknowledged by genuine criticism only; before that, it was cried down as a tissue of absurdities. Setting his imperfections aside, we cannot indeed assign too high a rank to Dionysius, as a treasure of ancient history providentially preserved to us. He has borrowed, if not directly, at least indirectly, from the old law books and annalists; and without him we should not know any thing of the most important changes, to which, however, too often he only lends personifications. The careful use which he made of his sources renders him invaluable. Even the matter of his speeches he took from the old annalists; many circumstances at least, which were contained in them, and which he could not receive into the context of his history, he has introduced in his harangues, so that the latter, in which elsewhere the arbitrary fancy of the historian seems to prevail, often retain the traces of tradition. Thus, when there is a rising of the people, these words occur in the speech of a patrician, “If there is no more help for it, why should we not, rather than humble ourselves before these plebeians, grant Isopolity to the Latins?” Now this Isopolity, as we must take it for granted, is in the subsequent peace imparted to the Latins, which is, however, not mentioned in Dionysius. This is one of the passages in which he introduced a notice found in the annalists, on the occasion of the conclusion of the peace, as subject matter into a speech. Only we must discriminate between his mistakes, and the substance of the valuable information which he gives. If he had succeeded in comprehending the language of Fabius, all would have been correct; but he understood the Greek language as it was current in his own time, and thence all his mistakes arose. He has lost the clue in the history of the development of the Roman constitution: he is not aware of the difference between δῆμος and ὅμιλος, but he gives all, though it appears to him a riddle, and tries to find a solution. That he is a rhetorician and not a statesman, we indeed see only too clearly. In his criticism he is faulty, but, for all that, not bad: he was a very clear-headed man. With very little exception his language is correct and well suited to its purpose. What we may object to in him, are the harangues, in which the distinctness of individual character is entirely lost; an ill-timed imitation of those of Thucydides. I have worked through this author from my early youth, as no one perhaps has done since he has written, and I may say that I entertain infinite respect and veneration for him; and I am convinced that except in the speeches and pragmatical reflections, he has not by any means invented or intentionally omitted anything. He worked out his sources, it is true, without selection, and cared only for the abundance of the materials which were offered to him. Nothing is more unjust than the opinion formerly entertained, that all that Dionysius had more than Livy was merely the invention of his brain.

About the same time, 743 according to Cato, and 745 according to Varro, Livy began to write. That he commenced so late seems authenticated. He was born 693 according to Cato, in the consulship of the great Cæsar, at Patavium, and lived during the reign of Tiberius, until 772 according to Cato (774 according to Varro), A.D. 20. Livy commenced his career as a rhetorician. Of his early life nothing is known. He has written on rhetoric also. There are several grounds for fixing the period in which he began to compose his history at so late a date. His first decade has been called the work of his youth, but the following proofs are against it. Mentioning Numa, he speaks of Augustus as the restorer of all the temples, consequently after 730; moreover he talks of the closing of the temple of Janus, of the building of the temple of Jupiter Feretrius, and he names Cæsar Augustus in relating the war of Cossus. Dodwell very seldom hits upon the right conclusion, but in this point we must agree with him. In his Annales Velleiani he remarks, that from the manner in which Livy wrote about Spain, it is evident that that country had already then been conquered by Augustus. The ninth book is of later date than the campaign of Drusus; for he says in it concerning the Silva Ciminia, that it had been just as impassable quam nuper fuere Germanici saltus, and the latter were first entered by Domitius Ahenobarbus and Drusus after 740 only. It might be attempted to make this out to be a later revision; but it is easy to tell what books are written in one flow of the pen, and which are revised, and those of Livy undoubtedly belong to the former sort.—It is in accordance with our supposition, that Dionysius did not know him; for if a book written in such a masterly style as that of Livy had existed, Dionysius could not have been ignorant of it; and it would then have been impossible also for him to complain of the utter want of any thing like the working out of the materials of Roman history. In the last books of the first decade, on the other hand, we find several traces that Livy had known Dionysius. From the Excerpta de Legationibus we learn, in what manner Dionysius treated the second Samnite war; the relation of it by Livy cannot possibly have been taken from Roman Annals, but from Greek sources, especially the account how Naples fell into the power of the Romans, which Dionysius seems to have got from a Neapolitan Chronicle. Livy could not know the latter himself, and yet he gives a circumstantial description of the event. He must therefore have had a Greek source, and this is certainly no other than Dionysius. The comparison also of the might of Alexander with that of Rome leads to the same conclusion. And certainly the histories of Pyrrhus king of Epirus, and of the plundering expedition of Cleonymus, are likewise from the Greek; so much the rather, as Livy here calls the Sallentines Messapians,[23] probably because he did not know that this was the Greek name for the Sallentines. Already from the eighth book, Livy must have made use of Dionysius.—Let no one say that his history has too much freshness for it to be deemed the work of an old man: this depends entirely upon the character of the individual. He had yet, even with his mode of working, nearly thirty years’ time for the accomplishment of his immense undertaking. That he did not cut it off where it finishes, but that he died before he had reached his goal, is evident from several circumstances. His history consisted of a hundred and forty-two books, and ended with the death of Drusus without any marked close. The feeling against disproportion in a division by numbers was among the ancients quite decided and developed, and therefore the number itself bears witness to the books not having been completed. There can be no question, but that the division into decades is an original one, and we might see it yet more clearly if we had the second decade left. Even the Greek word decas would not have been invented in later times. The twentieth book must have been double the size of the rest, in order that the war with Hannibal might not begin with the twenty-second book. At the end of the war with Hannibal, the books are extremely short, in order that it might finish with the thirtieth book. He cannot therefore have intended to close the work in the middle of a decade. At least the epitome reaches only as far as book 142, so that at all events we should be obliged to assume, that as two books in the middle, thus also at the conclusion some are still wanting.

When we attentively consider the work of Livy, we find it written in an astonishingly uneven style. The several decades essentially differ from each other, and in the first decade, the first book from the rest. This one is the very perfection of his manner, and shows how matchless he would have been, had his history been more condensed. Throughout the first decade, a high strain of eloquence prevails. In the third, the monotony of the events constantly checks its display; yet beautifully written are the battles on the Trasimene Lake, and at Cannæ. Here, however, is the turning point. In the fourth, the prolixity gains ground more and more, in which traces of extreme old age are to be recognised. The more freely Livy relates, the more beautiful is his composition. The fourth decade is far below the third; in the fourth and fifth he has to a great extent paraphrased Polybius. He could not have chosen better with regard to credibility; but here he is hurried, and it happens also that he contradicts himself, and that, telling the same things twice over, he becomes prolix, which he never is in the first and third decades. But particularly remarkable is the fragment from the ninety-first book; which is written in such a manner, that if it were not inscribed T. Livî liber XCI, and that some circumstances bore evidence for it, one would not take it for a work of Livy. Here we understand how the old grammarians could have reproached him with tautology and palilology;[24] here we see how a great writer may become old and garrulous. If the second decade had not been lost also, it would be easy to explain how the later ones have perished, viz. by their being excluded from the grammatical schools. His preface is characteristic, belonging to the worst parts of the whole work, whilst on the contrary the introductions in those great practical historians, Thucydides, Sallust, Tacitus, are masterpieces. This is to be explained from the fact, that Livy began without being conscious of any definite object, and those other writers with a bold stroke of the pencil drew the results of long lucubration.

It is evident that when Livy commenced his work, he was far from being well versed in Roman history; he had read some of the old books, and he may have been, compared with others, well acquainted with ancient history: but he was entirely deficient in general and comprehensive historical knowledge. He wrote it, as he himself states in the preface, from the pleasure which he took in history, and for consolation in a cheerless and most gloomy period; the rising generation were to be refreshed with the remembrance of the glorious times of old; after having once resolved upon this work, he had set about it in the first exultation of enthusiasm. In writing the history of the kings, he apparently followed Ennius. We perceive that clearly it is consistent, and of a piece. As he went on, he gradually got hold of more authors, but always a very limited number. As in Dionysius every thing is connected, so in Livy all is isolated. He had not at all made it his task to write a learned and scrupulously sifted history. With foreign histories he is altogether unacquainted. He could not have written that the Carthaginians first came to Sicily in 324, if he had known that fifty years before they had already undertaken their first great expedition thither. That of Alexander of Epirus would, according to him, have lasted eighteen years. He also mistakes Heraclitus, Philip’s ambassador to Hannibal, for the philosopher of the same name.

The ancients were generally in the habit of dictating their works; this is to be seen in none more clearly than in Livy. He worked out each of the years separately; and very often the later ones are in contradiction to those which go before, so that we find that he did not even once submit the whole to a connected revision. Fabius, Valerius Antias, Tubero, and Quadrigarius,—whether this last from the beginning cannot be ascertained,—are the authors whom he made use of; and perhaps, though I doubt it, Cato’s Origines also. He read himself, or had some one to read to him, the events of a year, and then dictated his narrative from it, taking one annalist in preference as his groundwork; and therefore in most cases there are no contradictions in the history of the same year. As he went on, he got hold of authors whom he had not known originally; for instance, the Annales Pontificum for the first time just before the end of the first decade, Polybius not earlier than the middle of the war of Hannibal. The account of the siege of Saguntum, which is so poor in incident, and that of the passage of Hannibal over the Alps, would surely have been differently told by him, if instead of Cœlius Antipater, he had availed himself of Polybius. It was only when he reached the history of Philip of Macedon, that he looked into Polybius; in the fourth decade, he translates from him every thing that he has not taken from the next annalists concerning the internal affairs of Rome. Thus he certainly had before him Posidonius after Polybius, and then the Memoirs of Rutilius and of Sylla; in later times, perhaps Asinius Pollio, Theophanes, and others. The farther he advanced, the nearer he came to the work for which he was really fitted, only he had unfortunately become old in the meanwhile. The delineation of the character of Cicero from Livy in M. Seneca’s Suasoria, is done in a masterly style. One is more and more convinced how richly Livy was endowed with a talent for description and narration of the kind which we prize in the novelists of our time. What he is utterly deficient in, is comprehensiveness of view. He often takes from an annalist an account, which presupposes quite different circumstances from those which he himself has set forth. Wherever he wants to give a summary, one sees that what a little while since he had written, nay, even what he had quite close before him, was not at all present to his mind. Thus the enumeration of the nations which fell off immediately after the battle of Cannæ is entirely wrong, there being several among them who only revolted some years afterwards. He shows himself to be no critic in the war of Hannibal, where he repeats the tales which Cœlius Antipater only could have devised; and moreover we find in him an entire absence of judgment with regard to an event and the actors in it, whether they were right or wrong. In early life, he was on Pompey’s side; that is to say, a partisan of that chaos which had grown up out of the Roman constitution. He was then very young, being only ten years old when Cæsar came to Italy. This bygone time before the dictatorship of Cæsar, appeared to his imagination as a golden age. Thus a friend of my youth, a Frenchman and a staunch royalist, remarked to me, that the French nobles who at the outbreak of the Revolution were still young, were the most fiercely zealous against its ideas, and looked upon the period immediately preceding it as a time of the highest felicity. Livy seems to have been one of those men who never put to themselves the question, What ought then to have happened, if matters had not come to a crisis? Yet it is natural that after Cæsar’s victory noble minds should have inclined to Pompey, who seemed to uphold the ancient usages and constitution; and it is only now that we are able to recognise Cæsar to have been the most beneficial of the two leaders. Livy, moreover, applies his party names to persons and to circumstances which were quite different, and he looks upon every thing that belongs to the tribunes as seditious. When he tells us of Tarquin the Proud, how he usurped the dominion over the Latins, and how Turnus Herdonius, evidently with the greatest justice, withstood him, he calls the latter homo seditiosus, iisque artibus potentiam nactus. Thus Livy must have proverbially become what is called in France an Ultra. In this sense Augustus called him a Pompeian; though he did not fear him, because no real effects were to be expected from such daydreams.

Whether the Patavinity with which Asinius Pollio has taxed him, had reference to his history, or to the speeches which he was heard to deliver as a rhetorician, we are no longer able to ascertain. The latter supposition is very likely. Pollio may have said, “one still perceives from the pronunciation of Livy, that he was not bred in Rome,”—just as in Paris also one can tell provincials. I myself think that I can make out whether the author of a work lived in Paris or at Geneva, and a Frenchman of course discovers it yet more quickly. There may, therefore, have existed some nice shades of distinction, even in style itself, which now-a-days escape our observation. The Latin of Livy in a grammatical point of view is perfectly classical and correct; yet for all that, it is by no means impossible that either in speaking or in writing, he may have ventured upon many an expression which was not usual at Rome. There remains yet another question. Have we any reason to believe with regard to Livy’s history, which was commenced thirty-one years after Pollio’s consulship, that Asinius Pollio could have known it? It is possible. We have an account of his being still living after Caius Cæsar’s death.[25] Yet this can hardly be true, as Pliny would in that case have certainly mentioned him among the longævi.

Particularly worthy of notice is the amiable disposition of Livy. The whole of his work breathes a kindliness and serenity which does one’s heart good in reading it. Perhaps we should observe this yet more clearly, if we had the later books. Few writers have had such an influence as Livy. He forms an epoch in Roman literature: with him every attempt ceases to write Roman annals. When Quintilian compares him with Herodotus, this is only correct with regard to the amenity of style which is common to both. Otherwise Livy is particularly deficient in those qualities which Herodotus possesses, than whom none was ever richer in remembrances and ancient lore; than whom there never was a more gifted investigator; and who was indeed a master both in observing and in research. Livy’s great talent, on the contrary, is that of arranging details, and of narration. Of the old Roman constitution he had no notion whatever. Even of the constitution which still existed during his youth, he seems to have had no very accurate knowledge; but whatever in the old institutions bore the same name as in his time, he always confounds with what was more recent. On the other hand, he gives accounts which are inappropriate as applying to his own era, but quite correct with reference to the olden time. He had a wonderful reputation in his day: it is a known fact that a man came from Cadiz to Rome merely to see him, and then immediately went back again. This fame lasted. He was the historian Κατ’ ἐξοχήν, and Roman history was learned from him alone. Whatever in after times was written by Latins, was scarcely more than extracts from him. Wherever in the later Roman authors any thing is quoted from history, it is taken from Livy: Silius Italicus, the most wretched of all poets, has done nothing but paraphrase him. And therefore he was read in the rhetorical and grammatical schools, particularly, as it seems, his first and third decades. These grammatical schools existed in Rome until beyond the seventh century, in Ravenna even down to the eleventh. It is, however, remarkable that all the manuscripts of the first decade may be traced back to a single one, which was written in the fourth century by a certain Nicomachus for Symmachus and his family, but is most wretchedly done.

We have no manuscript in which all the books which have been preserved are contained. Where the first, third, and fourth decade are together, the fourth is never entire; and all the manuscripts are very recent, dating from the fourteenth century. One sees that he was little read during the middle ages, as they made shift with the most trivial extracts. Of the first books we have manuscripts of the tenth century. At the restoration of learning, the first and third decades existed in pretty many manuscripts; the fourth in few only, and those mutilated. Yet the fourth decade was indeed known and read before that time, as may be seen from a novel of Francesco Sacchetti. But the thirty-third book was entirely wanting; and the fortieth, from the third paragraph of chapter 37. The latter gap was filled up from a Mentz manuscript in the edition printed in that town, A.D. 1518; but the one in the thirty-third book, from the sixth paragraph of the seventeenth chapter only. The last five books were published from a manuscript of the monastery of Lorsch, of the seventh or eighth century (codex Laurishamensis), now at Vienna, in the Basle edition of the year 1531. The first sixteen chapters of the thirty-third book have been published at Rome in 1616, from a Bamberg manuscript, and again collated by Gœller (as the Laurishamensis for the last five books was by Kopitar), who has found some important various readings. Yet these have always remained defective.

The desire to obtain the missing parts of Livy’s history was universal; and in the days of Louis XIV. especially, people allowed themselves to be taken in by the most extravagant stories. At one moment, they were said to be in existence at Constantinople;[26] at another, at Chios; and then, in an Arabic[27] translation, at Fez. Only a short time ago, one heard of a translation, which was said to have been found at Saragossa. At Lausanne there formerly existed a complete manuscript of the fifth decade; but it has been lost. A real treasure was found by Bruns of Holstein, who lived at Rome in 1772 and 1773. He discovered a little volume in which some books of the Old Testament, in the Vulgate version but with very differing readings, were contained; and which almost entirely consisted of re-written leaves, originally from the Heidelberg Library to judge from the handwriting, perhaps a Bobbian manuscript. In this he found M. Tullî Ciceronis Oratio pro Roscio incipit feliciter; and seeing that it began differently from the speeches as they usually were, he considered it to be the lost commencement of the oration pro Roscio Comœdo. He called in the learned and ingenious Italian Giovenazzi, and asked him to examine it; the latter decided that it was the Oratio pro Roscio Amerino, yet did not observe the excellent various readings, nor discover in what preceded the lost oration pro Rabirio perduellionis. They turned over some more leaves, and found some very elegant hand writing with the superscription T. Livî liber nonagesimus primus. The aid of chemical means being as yet unknown in those days, they read it with incredible exertions. It was reserved for me, to do what they could not accomplish. I have read it all through, and completed it.

The text is very different in different decades. As far as regards the first of these, all the manuscripts which hitherto have been deemed authentic only follow the recension of Nicomachus Dexter Flavianus, whose subscription is found beneath the Florentine copy, the first of Leyden, and some others. These manuscripts, the text of which that of Florence gives very accurately, are all of them bad. Some various readings are exhibited by several English, Harleyan and Lovel manuscripts; but these are extremely recent, from philologists of the time of the restoration of learning, who made very free with the text, and therefore they are not of a good description. One single manuscript, of which we have only extracts, shows some quite extraordinary readings, the Codex Clockianus, concerning which we know not where it now is. These variations are so peculiar, that I often doubted whether they were always authentic, and whether Clockius really had a manuscript. The Veronese palimpsests exhibit no deviation of consequence from the Florentine manuscript. We cannot therefore hope to get beyond the recension of Nicomachus, at least as far as our present knowledge of the manuscripts enables us to judge. Of the Paris manuscripts, not one as yet has been collated. It is otherwise with the third decade, for which the Codex Puteanus, which Gronovius has made use of, is excellent. The text here is sounder than in the first; for the fourth, the Bamberg and the Mentz manuscripts, and the Editio Ascensiana have a strong claim on our regard. For the fifth decade, the Codex Laurishamensis, now preserved at Vienna, is the only source. From Italian libraries, we can no longer expect much; as the first editions generally represent the manuscripts, and the best manuscripts of Latin authors are, on the whole, not in Italy, but in France and in Germany.

As far as regards commentaries, it is really astonishing how little has been done in the way of criticism for Livy; and yet he is one of the first who has been subjected to any elaborate criticism. Already was this done by the ingenious Laurentius Valla, whose learning was of the true philological cast, and who even before the invention of printing, wrote short scholia, and likewise an historical disquisition concerning Tarquin the Proud, whether he was a son, or a grandson of Tarquinius Priscus? Then follows M. Antonius Sabellicus, a Venetian, of whom some annotations still exist, which, considering his great ability, are very trifling. Glareanus was a very ingenious and acute man. His attention was especially directed to the historical part, and in his remarks he frankly pronounces much of it to be untenable. The emendation of the text was then taken in hand by many persons whose names are not known. Gelenius has certainly aided in the Basil edition, without his name being mentioned. When Glareanus had finished, Sigonius of Modena wrote his scholia on Livy. His work is very good and praiseworthy,—his criticisms chiefly historical. He most unaccountably bore a strong grudge against Glareanus, and the latter replied in an edition in which he had Sigonius’ notes reprinted. Sigonius has contributed much towards the criticism of the text; but he has also interpolated a great deal that is untenable, part of which still stands in the text. Then follow almost a hundred years, during which nothing was done for Livy, until John Frederick Gronovius, sprung from an Holstein family at Hamburgh, appeared; who, when philology was in a dying state, might have given it a new impulse, had the age been susceptible of it. His Livy is a masterpiece. He is one of the earliest who conscientiously searched into manuscripts. His careful grammatical and historical commentary gains for him the palm among all who have occupied themselves with Livy; only, when he speaks of the constitution and laws of the State, he has sometimes made mistakes, and unjustly censured Brissonius. After him came Clockius, whose conjectures are most unlucky; and then Tanaquil Faber of Saussure, who, though he was very intelligent, has done very little for Livy; nor is his criticism much to be relied on. Duker’s and Drakenborch’s edition holds the first rank among all the editions which we have of ancient authors. Duker’s notes are excellent,—a striking contrast to his Thucydides,—he shows likewise a very correct judgment concerning the subject-matter. Drakenborch is far from possessing the same penetration and ability, but for all that he has very good common sense; his application, which is scrupulously conscientious, is admirable, and he scrutinizes every thing most accurately. The treasure of philological remarks which he has hoarded up is really astonishing, and his indices are very much to the point. Drakenborch is a model in this also, that he had already completed the whole of his work before he began to publish it. The subject-matter is quite evenly disposed all through the work.

After this, little was done for the criticism of Livy. The emendations of Professor Walch of Berlin are beautiful, and it is a pity that he has not realized his intention of editing the whole of Livy. Yet a very great deal remains to be done, especially in the first decade. The nations of Roman language have gained for themselves little or no distinction with regard to Livy.

Livy is one of those authors whose fate it was, like all who form an epoch in literature, that his influence was not wholly beneficial, but also pernicious. He became from henceforth an authority, although he was no critic; people read the Roman history in Livy only, and the old historians were almost entirely forgotten. The only exception which we know of Roman history being written independently of Livy, is that of Velleius Paterculus, who began from the mythic legends, and wrote as far as the year 783. He divided his work into two books, the first of which ended with the destruction of Carthage; and besides the Roman, treated also of the earliest Greek history. Unfortunately the second book only is any thing like complete, as in the first the whole of the earlier history is wanting, a loss which is very much to be regretted. Velleius belongs to the writers of evil repute, and it is not to be denied but that a dismal time has crushed him and his independent spirit. He crouches before the tyrant Sejanus; but one must not overlook the fact, that he was much more ingenious than his contemporaries. He is exceedingly witty, and there is something choice in his remarks; besides which he is perfectly master of his subject, and shows himself to be a deeply read and deeply learned scholar. He reminds one of the authors in the time of Louis XV.

It is not quite decided that Fabius Rusticus has not written the earliest history. He was perhaps the only man in his time who could have done it.

The manner in which from henceforth Roman history was written was to epitomize it, of which we have several examples.

There is extant an old table of contents of all the books of Livy, of which two only, the hundred and thirty-sixth and the hundred and thirty-seventh, are wanting,—a sort of index for those who wished to search for any thing in the great work, and perhaps nothing more than a collection of the heads which were written in the margin. This epitome bears quite inappropriately the name of Florus. The author is unknown, and it is certainly only the work of some copyist. But to us it is invaluable, as many things have been preserved in it alone.

Well known and much read was the Roman history of Florus in four books, which, written in the reign of Trajan, is a very wretched piece of work. Yet at the side of many glaring mistakes, there is something which may be turned to use. Florus may have written from what he read in Livy; yet there is in one single passage a deviation from him, so that he must have read others also.

Eutropius has evidently every where followed the track of Livy; but he is so bad a writer, that one cannot believe that he has read Livy. I therefore conjecture that there must have existed an abstract besides, forming a sort of medium between the work itself and our epitome; which Orosius no doubt also read, who likewise implicitly follows Livy, but assigns dates which clash with him, a practice quite in keeping with his ignorance in changing the dates by consuls into those by years. Such an abstract was like that of Trogus from Justin. Orosius’ object was simply this, to console his contemporaries in the state in which they were by means of perversions and sophisms in describing the wretchedness of the olden time. Yet there are many points in which his statements have great value, only one must not allow oneself to be misled by him.

The influence which Livy had exercised upon the Romans, in putting an end to every thing like originality in writing history, did not extend to the Greeks. They directed their attention more and more to Roman history, and found in it a theme for rhetorical and elegant composition. One of those who at that time more or less engaged in this task, was Plutarch, who composed his historical works in the reign of Trajan. He had a definite moral purpose, his was a fine soul: yet neither was he a practical man, nor had he a turn for speculative thought, but he was made for quiet and cheerful contemplation, like Montaigne. He had an unaffected aversion to all that was vulgar; and he wrote in this spirit for himself and his friends, the parallels of distinguished Romans and Greeks. He is just to every body. He loves the Greeks and respects the Romans, and this makes his Lives most delightful reading. But his qualities as an historian are of a very secondary order. He is no critic, and does not discriminate between conflicting opinions; but he follows at one time one authority, and at another time another. In Pyrrhus and Camillus, one sees that he has used Dionysius; in Marius and Sylla, Posidonius; and wherever we are able to make this out, his history gains a much more important character for authenticity. The task of ascertaining this point is as yet far from being accomplished. Plutarch, as he himself tells us, understood little of Latin, and was particularly ignorant of the grammar, owing to which mistakes are found in him here and there, though indeed but seldom.

About a generation after Plutarch, Appian wrote. He was a jurist from Alexandria, who in the reigns of Adrian and Antoninus Pius, lived in Rome as an agent for his native town, and had the management of lawsuits. He was greatly befriended by Fronto, and by his interest got the office of a Procurator Cæsaris. Although he had lived a long time at Rome, and had a great opinion of his Latin, yet it is not to be supposed that he was very conversant with that language; as, owing to Adrian’s predilection for Greek, he surely was allowed to plead in it, especially for the transmarini. Having made a fortune at Rome, he returned to Alexandria, and was in his old age treated with much distinction by the Romans. According to one account, he has written twenty-four books on Roman history; among them four on Egypt, in which he treated with particular prolixity of the Lagides. It was not a continuous history, but arranged after the plan of the Origines of Cato. The first book was called Βασιλική, the second Ἰταλική, the third Σαυνιτική. The first twenty-one books of his work went as far as the battle of Actium; then the subsequent times down to Trajan he disposed of in one book Ἑκατονταετία; besides which he wrote a book on the Dacian, and another on the Arabian war of Trajan. He is a compiler, and knew well how to choose his sources. In the earlier history he chiefly follows Dionysius; in the second Punic war, perhaps also in the first, he follows Fabius; then Polybius, and afterwards Posidonius. In using these sources, he displays great ignorance, particularly of geography. Thus, for example, he believes that Britain was quite close to the northern coast of Spain, and he places Saguntum on the northern bank of the Iberus. We must discriminate with regard to him. Wherever he copies without thinking, we find in his work the best sources for history. The greater half of the books of Appian are lost. We possess eleven of them, and besides these, there are extracts in the Eclogæ de Legationibus, and de Virtutibus et Vitiis, collected by Ursinus and Valesius. Spurious is the Παρθική, as Schweighäuser has correctly demonstrated.

There are of Appian, properly speaking, only three editions, those of Stephens, Tollius, and Schweighäuser, the last of them being by far the best. Much remains to be done for the Bellum Illyricum, as Spaletti has kept his collation for it from Schweighäuser. A good source also made use of by the latter, is the Latin version of Petrus Candidus, which though barbarous is faithful.

About eighty years after Appian, wrote Dio Cassius, surnamed Cocceianus, who was born in the reign of Antoninus Pius at Nice in Nicomedia, of a family which was of very high standing in the Roman State. Very likely Dio Chrysostom was his grandfather on the mother’s side. He came as a young man to Rome, at a time when the provincials of the east were already admitted to the highest offices, which was much earlier the case with those of the west. Whilst the latter soon assimilated themselves in language and address to the Romans, the former amalgamated much later, and from sheer necessity. In the eastern provinces they still let the beard grow, as we see from the likeness of the statuary Apollodorus in the Trajan column, the most ancient likeness of an artist. From the time of Adrian the Greeks met in Rome with a different reception from that which they had before; this emperor favoured them, as did also the Antonines. Marcus Antoninus even married one of his daughters to Pompeian a Greek.

Dio came early to Rome, where he lived forty years engaged in business, and then retired to Capua. He wrote, when about forty years old, the history of Commodus, which he dedicated to Severus, who received it with favour, and encouraged him to write the whole Roman history. He became consul under Septimius Severus, and a second time under Alexander Severus. He reached an age of nearly eighty years, and had, according to Fabricius’ computation, already reached that of seventy when he was for the second time invested with the consulship. He spent twelve years in collecting materials, and during ten he worked. If this account be correct, the last books must be a continuation of his work. Being a statesman, he paid attention to many things in history which his predecessors had not cared for. He had a true vocation for writing history, and declared that in his dreams the gods had commanded him to do so. He was a perfect master of the Latin language, thoroughly acquainted with all the Roman affairs, and he felt an interest in political concerns. He is every where at home, in the laws, in the constitution, and in matters connected with warfare. Livy had no idea of either the economy of a state, or of a battle; the commonest rules for the array of an army escape him. Surely he can never have looked on, when the soldiers were drilling at Rome.

For the very earliest times, Dio Cassius draws from the very fountain-heads. He wrote quite independently of Livy from Fabius, and he perfectly understood the old Roman constitution. On the other hand, he is reproached with κακοήθεια, and ἐπιχαιρεκακία, with its being a pleasure to him to bring to light the hollowness of men’s pretensions to political virtue, and such like things. Indeed he is in a bitter mood against the false pretences to virtue in a thoroughly corrupted age; but this is quite different from showing an infamous delight in it. The former only is the real character of Dio Cassius. When a man scoffs at religion, it is the sign of a bad heart; but when he snatches the mask from the face of a hypocrite, he is quite in the right. When one hears the language of so-called patriots of the time of George the First and Second, and then learns how they intrigued for places, how in spite of their boasted integrity they kept up a secret correspondence with the Pretender, and when they came into power did the very self-same things as their predecessors, it is very natural to speak with disgust of such sham patriots. In the time also of Louis XV. such a state of feeling as we find in Dio Cassius was universal. Dio, owing to his experience in a most abandoned age, may have judged many a man too harshly; but at bottom his view of things is sound and enlightened. That he was no friend to tyranny, is shown every where in his history, when one reads it without prejudice. His style, however, is not flowing; his peculiarities are sometimes faults (examples of it are given in the index of Reimarus). He is one of the few who at that time wrote as men really spoke; on which account the study of his language is very instructive. There is no affectation in him, as in Pausanias; his language is the Greek, as it was then used in familiar conversation. His history was much read. It was for a long time a common source of Roman history, and was continued by an anonymous writer to the time of Constantine, as we know from the Excerpta de Legationibus. He himself divided his eighty books into decades. The twentieth book he concluded with the destruction of Carthage; the fortieth went as far as the outbreak of the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey; the sixtieth, to the death of Claudius. Of these there were left in the twelfth century, when Johannes Zonaras wrote, only the first twenty, and from the thirty-sixth to the end. In the tenth century when Constantinus Porphyrogenitus caused the excerpta to be made, the whole was still extant. Afterwards, in the eleventh century, the monk Xiphilinus made extracts beginning from the thirty-sixth book, with the exception of the history of Antoninus Pius, and a part of M. Aurelius’ reign. Whether he had the rest or not, is no more to be ascertained. It is, however, probable, as Zonaras fifty years later had still the first twenty books. It has therefore been unjustly said that the loss of the books of Dio was the fault of Xiphilinus. His manuscript was still complete as regards the reigns of Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius, where the Venetian is full of gaps. The very late author of the Lexicon Syntacticum, which Bekker has edited, already in all probability had no more the first five and thirty; as from these, in comparison with the other books, he gives scarcely any extracts at all. We have a fragment which is generally thought to be of the thirty-fifth book, but which, according to Reimarus, most likely belongs to the thirty-sixth; then from the thirty-seventh to the fifty-fourth complete, and the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth mutilated. Of the first twenty books we have the abstract of Zonaras, with slight admixtures from Plutarch; of the last forty-five, that of Xiphilinus likewise with admixtures. Of books 78, 79 and 80, we have an important fragment from the Vatican library. In books 55 to 60, the manuscripts are full of gaps: Xiphilinus, however, had yet a complete copy of them. Morelli, an excellent philologist, found these books in the year 1797, when, to console himself for the downfall of his republic, he took to ancient history as a refuge, in a very old manuscript in the library of St. Mark, and discovered that it had formerly been complete, but had suffered much from the destruction of part of the fascicles and leaves; that this was the mother-manuscript for these six books; but that when the copyist in his transcript had come to a stop in some story, and the beginning of the next was mutilated, he had entirely dropped such incomplete narrations, and disguised the gaps. Morelli has collected these defective passages, so that we see how at one place some leaves, at another, whole quaternions are missing. From what he communicated, the remarkable expedition of Ahenobarbus to Germany was first brought to light, which had till then been unknown. Thus also in Diodorus, the halves of two books are entirely wanting, a circumstance which is nowhere noticed. In a third passage, Perizonius and others have discovered it. Such a thing was by no means of rare occurrence among the volatile Greeks of the fifteenth century, who gained their livelihood by copying.—What remains of the three last books of Dio Cassius, has been edited by Fulvius Ursinus. The manuscript is of the seventh or eighth century; yet the centre column only has been preserved entire: the two others along the margins are illegible. Nevertheless something may be gleaned from it. In the excerpta de Legationibus, de Virtutibus et Vitiis, and de Sententiis, many pieces from Dio are to be found. We have also many fragments elsewhere, as Dio was very much read. There are besides the abridgments of Xiphilinus and Zonaras. It is surprising that the latter is not also reprinted in the edition of Reimarus. This Zonaras,[28] under Alexius and Kalojohannes Comnenus, was a man of business, and wrote a history from the beginning of the world to the death of Alexius Comnenus. The first volume of it is an abstract from Josephus, the second from Dio, and the third from several, particularly from Cedrenus, Skylitzes, and others; as to the later books of Dio, he could not procure them in spite of all his inquiries. He was imperial secretary, and commander of the body-guard. Nor was he a fool, though his judgment is exceedingly narrow; but his extracts from Dio, whom he does not mention as his authority, are of the highest importance. He was formerly overlooked, and I was the first to direct attention to him. Freinsheim made use of him where Livy is wanting, but no further. The excerpta de Sententiis especially, show with what accuracy he selected from Dio.

Dio has been edited by Stephens at Basle, and by H. S. Reimarus. A collation of the Venetian manuscript would be infinitely important. The annotations of Fabricius and Reimarus are of extraordinary value in an historical point of view. What is defective in Fabricius, as well as in his son-in-law Reimarus, is grammatical knowledge. Yet this deficiency has not prevented Reimarus from directing the whole of his attention to the index, which is excellent. If he had made the index before the edition was completed, he would have arranged quite differently the strictly philological part of his work. Philological indices are a most useful aid in study, and infinitely heighten the value of an edition. The task of compiling them leads to a great number of questions and inquiries, which otherwise would never have been thought of.[29]

After Dio, nothing original was any more written by Greeks on Roman history. In the middle ages, works were lost. Of Livy, the first and third decades were read in the schools for the provectiores, and for history men contented themselves with Florus, Eutropius, Rufus, Victor, and Orosius. Eutropius was read also, but spuriated, in a continuation of Paul Warnefrid and Sagax; besides which, as a chrestomathy of fine actions, Valerius Maximus, one of the most wretched of writers, was very much in vogue. People in those days generally cared only for what was ready at hand, and that they diligently worked at; but about any thing that was unknown they did not at all trouble themselves. If the glossators had not been tainted with the defects of their age, they might have got access to quite different sources, from which the law books were to be explained. Some men in the middle ages read indeed and collected manuscripts; but they had no comprehensive views—no sort of symmetry—no striving after any thing that was not at once within reach. Since Priscian, there is no direct quotation from Livy, except in Johannes Saresberiensis; and in him moreover, only from the books now extant. When in the fourteenth century the light was dawning, people began again to read Livy; as we see from a strange novel of Francesco Sacchetti, in which he speaks of a Florentine who was so absorbed in the study of Livy, that, when one Saturday, the workmen came to him for their wages, he spoke to them as though they were living in the time of Cato. Petrarch read the war of Hannibal in Livy, and also Cæsar’s Commentaries, with an ardour and a passionate fondness, with which they certainly had not been read since the times of the great Boëthius,—consequently for eight centuries. He in vain wished to have more of Livy; he had as yet only the epitome, of which, perhaps, he was the discoverer. Now awoke in the hearts of the Italians the desire of considering themselves as the successors and heirs of the ancient Romans, and they began to collect books wherever they found them. The letters of congratulation which were written by Leonardus Aretinus, Bartholomæus, and others, to Poggius, when he had discovered new books, are most affecting. The Roman history was read with an interest which beggars belief; and yet they kept to the works which they already had. But now they began to convince themselves that with the means which they had hitherto possessed, they were not capable of understanding the Roman history: and thus the study of Archæology grew up, to which Pomponius Lætus in particular gave an impulse; who, however, did much mischief by the negligent way in which he set about it. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the study of Roman antiquities made rapid progress; and collections of inscriptions and of antiquities were now first made in Italy and France by Mazocchi and others, who lived at that period. In Italy an equal degree of attention was not bestowed upon the ancient science of jurisprudence, which, strange to say, did not flourish in that country, though the interpretation of the civil law had originally sprung from thence. At that time scientific jurisprudence was the province of the French, while the Italians applied themselves to history, and to the investigation of authorities for that purpose. People also began to make remarks on particular parts of the history. Glareanus, a strange character, but of an acute and penetrating mind, began freely to examine and to scrutinize Livy. Panvinius, an Augustinian at Verona, and Sigonius of Modena, have first done something by arranging the Fasti, and elucidating the Roman antiquities; owing to them, the knowledge of Roman affairs advanced with colossal strides. They dwelt especially on the times of Cicero and Cæsar, for which there existed contemporary accounts; but they did not work their way into the earliest times. They fostered the tree, but there was no root to it. Both of them, and Panvinius in particular, were weak in Greek literature, and had a very deficient knowledge of Greek affairs. Both have done much; yet they were wanting in practical experience. The State, as it existed, was to them a mystery, although in some respects they had greater facilities than a foreigner, since many things presented themselves to their observation which were still continuing under the old names. They did not take a sufficiently clear view of things, and therefore they generally blundered in the exposition of details. Panvinius’ Fasti are a fine work; his supplements to them admirable, considering what his means were. It was his good fortune that in his time fragments of the Capitoline Fasti were found, when a church was building, which led to many results. Under my own eyes also some pieces were found, from which important hints may be gathered concerning the times in which Livy fails us.

The Fasti are preserved in many separate collections, and also for those periods in which history forsakes us. At the end of the sixteenth century, Stephen Pighius of Campen in Overyssel, secretary of Cardinal Granvella, and afterwards priest at Xanten,[30] conceived the idea of restoring the Roman history in the form of annals, including the times for which Livy fails us; and with this view he subjected the latter to a searching criticism. He was a man of very great learning,—his Hercules Prodicius, his notes on Valerius Maximus, &c. are excellent,—yet his annals are based on a mistaken idea. I tried once in my youth to learn the Fasti by heart, and I believe that the young Romans were used to do so; it is, however, of no great value. If the Fasti were all preserved, such annals as Pighius intended would be very important for us, but interesting in details only. Pighius, however, entered upon quite a chimerical undertaking. He wished to restore the lost periods of the Fasti; and in so doing, not only to mark the few notices which we possess, but also to fill up the gaps from possibilities, calculating what people might at that time according to the leges annales have held the offices. Yet he had no desire to deceive his readers, but he indicated his supplements as such; nevertheless G. J. Vossius has allowed himself to be misled by them, and after him even some scholars of the present day, as for example, Schubert of Königsberg in his book on the Ædiles. In spite of all this, Pighius’ book cannot be dispensed with, inasmuch as he availed himself of inscriptions, and made many acute combinations. Unfortunately his work was not completed; he died before its publication. Andreas Schottus finished and published it; but his continuation is far inferior.

The account of the manner in which Roman history was handled affords us an image of the progress of philology itself. In the fifteenth century it had scarcely awakened, and it was still uncritical; in the sixteenth, men penetrated quickly and deeply into the study of antiquity, without, however, fully securing the results; but the golden age of philology vanished in the beginning of the seventeenth, and in Germany, where it had blossomed only late, it was blighted by the thirty years’ war. It was now combined with other studies, and works were produced, which were laboriously and diligently executed, but of inferior philological merit, and devoid of genius. The Strasburg school of philologists especially, still maintained a certain pre-eminence. At the end of the thirty years’ war, John Freinsheim of that town wrote his supplements to the books of Livy. Of particular facts, he has left few unnoticed; yet he has but imperfectly succeeded in arranging the events of the obscure ages, and in entering more deeply into the spirit of the times. He had no idea of the Roman state either in relations of peace or of war, though he prided himself not a little on his prudentia civilis. For the second decade, especially books 11-15, and perhaps also four books 46-60, he had more complete materials, and made an energetic use of them; afterwards, he becomes more and more careless, and from the period of the Social War decidedly bad. Notwithstanding which, no one who works at Roman history can do without his book. Unfortunately, the quotations are very inaccurate, even in the original edition; and in that of Drakenborch, they are either made worse, or at least not corrected. Freinsheim, like his fellow citizens Boecler and Obrecht, is to be reckoned among the ornaments of Germany of that time. That he did not continue his immense work with equal care is very pardonable, and the preposterousness of the undertaking itself is to be charged to the taste of the age in which he lived.

About twenty years after him, quite a different man began a work on Roman history which is thoroughly classical. James Perizonius, in his Animadversiones Historicæ, undertook a critical review of Roman history, which, however, extended only to detached parts of it, though what he did was ably and beautifully executed. He first conceived the fruitful idea, that the Roman history, like that of the Jewish people, had arisen out of lays: an idea which we cannot sufficiently admire, when we consider the time in which he wrote, and that he was moreover a Dutch philologist; for such national songs are entirely wanting in the Netherlands. A Dane might much more easily have been its author, as Saxo Grammaticus and the songs of the Edda would have led to it. Perizonius had a perfectly unbiassed mind, incredible philological learning, and a real genius for history. Yet his Animadversiones have not had the influence which they deserved, as they were reprinted only once, and altogether forgotten.

After 1684, in a strictly philological point of view, little better than nothing was done for Roman history. Bentley and J. M. Gesner are almost the only exceptions to the wretched condition of philology during the first half of the eighteenth century. In the meanwhile there spread itself in Europe more and more a certain general mental cultivation, which laid claim to classical history as a part of the universal one; and in consequence, even men who had none of the deeper philological knowledge, occupied themselves with ancient history. Thus arose that little masterly work of president Montesquieu, Sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, which in spite of many mistakes is an excellent book.

At the end of the seventeenth century, scepticism had awakened in Europe; it originated with Bayle, and attacked history also. It did not, however, aim at establishing profound results; but was content with disclosing the mistakes in what had previously been considered as authentic history. In this spirit wrote a very ingenious man, a refugee who had lived a long time in England, Monsieur de Beaufort. His work on the Roman Antiquities, however much may be objectionable in it, considered as a whole is the best which has been written on the subject. It was clear to him, that the early Roman history was a poem, and no history; and this conviction of his he made known in his Dissertation sur l’incertitude des quatre premiers siècles de l’histoire Romaine. The work bears the stamp of an ingenious and well read man, who was no philologist by profession, and on the whole, not inured to accurate research; there is manifested in it that spirit of scepticism, which only destroys and does not attempt to rebuild; and therefore it excited much opposition. But the book has been of use. All that has been written since is based upon it.

What the worthy Rollin has compiled from Livy and from Freinsheim’s supplements, is not to be reckoned a Roman history. With very little talent, he shows such a respectable, virtuous, and upright disposition, that men were perfectly justified in putting it into the hands of youth; yet it is a dry book, which now-a-days scarcely any one would read through. His learning is very defective; he is destitute of all critical judgment, and without any insight into the state of affairs. People at that time, as a very witty writer remarks, treated ancient history as if it had never really happened.

Somewhat later,[31] Hooke wrote a work, with which indeed I am but slightly acquainted, and which, generally speaking, is not known in Germany. He took notice of Beaufort’s views, without, however, entering into any deeper questions; and he treated the history of those times only which he held to be historical.

This is no less the case in Ferguson’s history of the Roman Republic, which is a complete failure. He was judicious and honest, but unlearned; and he had not the remotest conception of the constitution. He gives full details only from the times of the Gracchi, and treats history pragmatically and morally. For the knowledge of history the book is of no value. Levesque’s history is downright trash: he deems the account of the earliest times to be nonsensical stuff, but quite in an arbitrary manner makes exceptions in favour of particular events. There is a low tone about the book, and there is no erudition in it. Micali’s Italia avanti il dominio de’ Romani is likewise a wretched work. He rouses himself into a strange passion against the Romans, and invents histories of the Italian States which could not be arrived at by any. Micali wrote at the time of the French ascendancy, and so he was glad to be able on this occasion to say something against the exclusive dominion of any one people; but he thus allowed himself to be betrayed into an unreasonable heat, and into unfairness against the Romans. Besides which, he is quite an unlearned man.

The general tendency of philology in Germany could not but lead to a critical treatment of Roman history, based on research. For the last forty years it has gained a settled character. The movement in it began on several quite distinct points, it lay in the very essence of the whole development of our literature. Men like Lessing, who, without any accurate philological learning, was endowed with a most philological spirit, and Winkelmann, are to be considered as the true fathers of modern improved philology. Thus also the attempts of Heyne and Ernesti, although very imperfect ones; the revival of historical jurisprudence;[32] as well as that of grammatical philology, by Reiz, Wolf, Hermann, the translations of Voss and others, have contributed much to Roman history. The spirit was awakened, the language moulded by Lessing and Goethe, and the age with its gigantic changes and revolutions filled every thing with life; and exertion was felt to be a necessity. All this must have reacted upon Roman history, and the more so as political affairs assimilated to those of the ancient Romans. By these circumstances especially, my attention was directed to the Roman state as it really was, and first turned to inquire into the question, why those violent struggles had taken place in Rome. Thus Roman history was now no more treated merely sceptically, but critically; results took the place of exploded inventions; it was shown what we are to believe, and what to reject as invention or interpolation; and, moreover, this advantage has been gained, that people know what they may receive as truth, with regard to ancient Roman history in general, without engaging in vain attempts to pursue it into all its details, with the dates accurately specified. In this immense labyrinth, these researches, as far as they regard the early times, could not succeed at once. He who entered into them was still fettered by many prejudices: he saw the goal, but got bewildered on his way. Thus it was imperatively demanded by good faith and conscientiousness, not to remain satisfied with what was already found, and to take courage to find the solution of enigmas. What could be gained for the early times, is now gained in all essential points; and it is time that these researches should not grow too much into fashion. Not that I am afraid, that the results obtained may be shaken; but since this work is limited by the extent of the sources, until fresh ones be discovered, nothing, on the one hand, can have been missed; and, on the other, nothing essential yet remains to be done. It is to be wished that men’s energies may now be directed to those points, from which important results are to be expected, especially within the range of the later periods. To know and to understand these, one should necessarily be acquainted with the ancient ages and forms; but one ought not to believe that the interest of the Roman history leaves off where contemporary accounts begin; as if those things only were interesting which are to be guessed. The Roman history is a whole. Emerging from the darkest ages, where it can be only restored by combinations, comparisons, and analogies, it reaches that stage in which it is borne out by the evidence of persons who are well informed. The remainder of Roman history, from the time when it becomes historical, must likewise be investigated, in order to gain settled results; or where they are already gained, calmly to examine them, and to make use of the materials which have been brought to light.

The study of ancient history requires for its basis a sound, able, philological, and grammatical spirit, which is proof against every temptation to indulge in fanciful etymologies; a well cultivated and practised taste, so as to distinguish possibilities or probabilities, and realities; a matured judgment; a knowledge of human and civil affairs, of those things which have happened in different ages, according to the same laws; and above all, conscientiousness and uprightness, free from all feelings of display and vanity,—a blameless walk before God. The adage of former times ought well to be laid to heart, that learning is the fruit of uprightness and piety.

When once we have a correct system of Roman antiquities, it will belong to scientific Roman history as an introduction to it. Now they are treated very differently from each other. The older works contain much that is excellent concerning those times for which Roman literature is coeval. In ancient geography also, a chorography of ancient Italy is still wanting; as to Mannert’s work, it can only receive a very qualified recommendation. Much better are Cluver’s Italia Antiqua and Sicilia, colossal works, which are, however, so rare, and so costly, that one cannot refer the student to them. In the details little is to be added, almost every thing in the classical writers which happens to bear upon the settlement of chorographical points being incorporated in them. What is decidedly deficient is the survey of the ancient nations; all his general views are vague. Yet the description of the country is admirable for his times.

As to maps, that of d’Anville is unquestionably to be recommended. D’Anville was a genius: he possessed the acuteness to discriminate among conflicting statements those which were worthy of belief; he was like a great artist, who, with very simple instruments, does more than another with the most perfect ones. His works on the interior of Africa are extraordinary, considering the few notices which he had. Not to be excelled are his maps of Gaul, Spain, and Britain; unsurpassed is his map of Italy, although much might be improved in it. He is less perfect with regard to Greece. For Epirus and Macedon, he was of course unable to make use of the more correct information of modern times, the interior of these countries not being then explored by travellers; the Peloponnesus he worked out mostly from the Portulan maps. Barbié du Bocage, his pupil, was likewise highly to be esteemed; but with such a predecessor, he was in a disadvantageous position. He continued several of d’Anville’s works with little success. He found, for instance, that Patras in d’Anville’s map was placed 30 minutes too far north, and he accordingly changed the position; yet, although he was in the right, he twenty years afterwards restored it to d’Anville’s original position. D’Anville has in Italy one single mathematical error with regard to the south-eastern part of Naples, where the country of the Sallentines lies about 20 minutes too little to the east. For d’Anville had as yet no other maps at hand but the Venetian ones, in which the outlines are generally excellent, but the longitudes for the most part incorrect. The comparison of d’Anville’s maps with those of his predecessors, as those of Delisle and others, makes him still more admirable. His map of Egypt is an extraordinary performance, if we consider that he had only the rude outlines of the Arabian and Turkish maps to work from. An apparent defect in his map of Italy is this, that it represents a distinct period, about that of Augustus, and in consequence there is a discrepancy in the settlement of the confines which might make one inclined to censure him; and yet one ought to be very careful not to do so. Samnium, for instance, according to Livy, still included a very large tract which d’Anville draws into Apulia, because he follows the description of Italy by Pliny.

Thoroughly bad is Reichardt’s map of Italy. Reichardt has no idea of ancient geography, and his map is a medley of ignorance and impudence. Places which never existed are described by him as towns of importance;—this he does in the case of Sublanuvium, Subaricia, stages for changing horses laid down in ancient itineraries beneath Lanuvium and Aricia, towns which were built on hills. A place of this kind happens to be called ad bivium, from which Reichardt makes a town ad Birium, of the size of Præneste and others in Latium. Aquila, founded during the middle ages, is described by him as an old Sabine town, merely because it bears a Roman name. Politorium, Medullia, and other towns in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, the accurate position of which is no more by any means to be made out, are placed by him just as fancy leads him, and on sites besides where they certainly could not have stood. He brings the Volscians as far as the mouth of the Tiber, whilst no one makes them extend farther than to Antium. Could I have overcome my disgust, and looked over the map of this man yet more accurately, I might have found many other similar blunders. Its only recommendation is the beauty of the engraving. D’Anville as yet remains unsurpassed. My father, who was certainly a competent judge in this matter, never spoke of him but in the highest terms of acknowledgment.

IMPORTANCE OF ROMAN HISTORY.

The importance of Roman history is one of those points which have never perhaps been gainsayed. There may be persons who have their prejudices with regard to the value of ancient history in general, yet even they will not deny that of Roman history. In other branches of knowledge, it either appears as an introduction, or as an integral part of the preparatory discipline. As long as the Roman law continues to hold among us the position which it now has, an accurate knowledge of Roman antiquity will be indispensable. Such will it likewise be for the divine, to whom the results which follow from the connexion of ecclesiastical with profane history are quite lost, if he be deficient in the knowledge of Roman history and Roman antiquities. With regard to many another science, there are fewer relations in which Roman history becomes of any importance; yet even then points of contact will not be wanting. It has its importance, for the history of human life in general, for the history of diseases, &c. Yet if, taking a wider and scientific view, we look on history as an independent branch of knowledge, that of Rome is the most important of all. All the ancient histories merge into the Roman, all the modern spring from it. Not only the philologist who occupies himself from preference with Roman literature, ought to be so familiar with the history and the antiquities of that people, that he may read its authors as he would contemporaries; but he also ought to do this, who makes the Greek his principal task, otherwise he would remain one-sided in his views. At all events, he ought to be acquainted with the concluding period of the Greek people, and to know how it fared under the rule of the Romans. If we balance the two histories against each other, the Roman one has by far the better claim to the higher rank. A small population enlarges itself, rules at first over thousands, then over hundreds of thousands, then lords it over the world from the rising to the setting sun; the whole of the west adopts their language and institutions, and their laws are to this day still in force for millions,—such greatness has no parallel in history. Add to this, the individual greatness of the men; the spectacle of all the states waning before this star; the extraordinary character of the institutions by which this is partly brought about; all this imparts to Roman history its peculiar durability and importance. For these reasons, even in the middle ages, in those times when learning was most neglected, it was, although in an imperfect form, yet always held in honour as history. By the Roman literature, science and civilization were first restored; Dante and Petrarch felt as warmly for the men of the Roman era, as an old Roman himself would have done. Valerius Maximus was during the middle ages the mirror of virtue, which with the Holy Scriptures was read by every one. The tribune Rienzi is said to have read all the books of the ancients. The Teutonic Knights had a book, still extant at Königsberg, which was read during dinner, containing stories from the Old Testament, and from the heroic age of Rome.[33] Thus since the restoration of learning to the present day, although Roman history was not always very profitably studied, there has notwithstanding ever been in every one a certain vague feeling which told them that it was transcendently important and instructive.

MANNER IN WHICH THE EARLY HISTORY OF ROME ORIGINATED.

When Fabius began to write the Roman history, his materials consisted of the Annales Pontificum; the Fasti; the Libri Pontificum, and Augurales for the time nearer his own; of the Laudationes, and of lays. Of the scantiness of these sources we have already convinced ourselves, but what were their contents? They cannot have been less worthy of belief than our Merovingian and other ancient annals. As the Annales Pontificum commenced ab initio rerum Romanarum, or at least from Numa, they might have been very authentic. The pontiffs, as Dionysius informs us, had with the greatest accuracy recorded in them year by year from the era of the kings; in the Fasti Triumphales it was even entered on what days the kings had triumphed over their foes. The consideration, however, that the ancient history, as it lies before us, is impossible, must lead us to the question of the credibility of the oldest annals. Our task therefore is that of now showing that the earliest history contains impossibilities; that it is poetical, and that every thing in it which does not bear the impress of a poetical character is a forgery; that thence it follows that the history must be reduced to ancient songs, and to a later invented chronology, which was adapted to those lays.

The accounts of the earliest times are materially different in Livy and Dionysius. Livy wrote his first book without any division of years, and with extraordinary fairness; he also had evidently Ennius before his eyes, as one may see from a comparison of the fragments of that poet with Livy;—e. g. Lib. II, 10. with Fragm. Ennii, Teque pater Tiberine tuo cum numine sancto. Dionysius tries to make out a true history. He takes it for granted that the Roman history must be capable of being restored in its details; that a truly historical groundwork was built over with fabulous legends; and so he endeavours to reconstruct it according to his notions; in doing which he sometimes makes himself really ridiculous by his pragmatical speeches in the mythic ages. Livy, on the contrary, writes history, as he found it in the oldest books, and as it appeared to him most beautiful, giving what was the old narrative before it was spoiled by too much art; and for this reason his account is the most unadulterated source for those times.

The history of the wondrous birth of Romulus is an historical impossibility, although it was historicised by the school of Piso. This is also the case with the rape of the Sabine women, of whom, according to the original tale, there were thirty; with the removal of Romulus from the earth during an eclipse of the sun;[34] and likewise with the long reign of Numa in unbroken peace, and that marriage of his with the goddess Egeria, which in the belief of Scipio’s contemporaries was held to be quite as historical as the Punic wars. There is a poetical impress of hoar antiquity in the story of the combat between the Horatii and the Curiatii, who were born by two sisters in one day, the effect of which is already somewhat marred in Livy. We next arrive at Tarquinius Priscus, who, with Tanaquil his wife came to Rome in the eighth year of the reign of Ancus (which lasted twenty-three years), then reigned himself thirty-eight more, and being at his death upwards of eighty, left infants behind him, who were brought up during the forty-three years’ reign of Servius; so that Tarquin the Proud must have been at least fifty years old, when he killed his father-in-law. Tanaquil, who lives to see this, and exacts an oath from Servius not to resign the crown, must at that time have been a hundred and fifteen years old. One of the first things told us of Servius is this, that a flame burns round his head, for the natural explanation of which Dionysius wishes to give hints. Collatinus is stated to have been the son of a brother of Tarquinius Priscus; this brother, it is said, was born before the removal of Tarquinius Priscus to Rome, a hundred and thirty-five years previous to the expulsion of Tarquin the Proud, and his son is now, more than a hundred and twenty years after his father’s birth, a young man of thirty. Brutus is described as a tribunus celerum, which was the highest office attainable by one of the equestrian body, by virtue of which he represents the king, assembles the senate, and is called upon to officiate at the highest sacrifices; and this office the king is declared to have given to a man whom he considered as half-witted and therefore deprived of the management of his own property, while Brutus, on the other hand, is said to have feigned imbecility that he might ward off the envy and covetousness of the king. He is stated to have been the son of a daughter of Tarquinius Priscus, and to have been afraid of rousing the anger of the king by taking upon himself the administration of his own possessions; yet Tarquin was not even of the same gens as himself. In the beginning of Tarquin’s reign, Brutus was a child; but immediately after the king’s expulsion, he has sons who are grown up youths.

All these details connected with dates, the list of which, down to the times of Camillus, might be vastly swelled, are so characterised by marks of inconsistency and historical impossibility, that it may safely be concluded that here we are entitled to the exercise of criticism. Let us now call to mind the twofold sources of the earliest Roman history,—the chronological ones, the Fasti, the Annales Pontificum; and the unchronological ones, the lays, Laudationes, the Libri Pontificum and Augurales. With regard to the chronological ones, we see that in the oldest accounts of Fabius, from the building of Rome to its destruction by the Gauls, 360 years are reckoned; precisely the number of the γένη in Attica, which number the Greeks already (especially Aristotle, from whom the grammarians Pollux, Harpocration, and others borrowed) declared to have been in imitation of the solar year. If we look more closely into it, 360 is the middle number between those of the days of the solar and lunar year, and the nearest to either of these capable of being conveniently divided. The time assigned for the kings, according to the older reckoning, was 240 years; that for the republic, 120. This number has the same mathematical character as those of the Indian ages of the world, the Babylonian, and other eastern numbers. The 120 years for the republic are received also by those who deem the whole period to have been 365 years. Whether these 120 years are correct, remains indeed to be decided according to one’s views with regard to the epoch of the dedication of the Capitol. That the annals of the pontiffs were destroyed when the city was burned by the Gauls, is strongly confirmed by Claudius (without doubt Claudius Quadrigarius) in Plutarch, and indirectly by Livy, who cannot state it in a direct manner, or else he would have declared his first books to be worthless. An additional proof of it is the fact, that the eclipse of the sun in the year 350 was the first one really observed which occurred in the annals; whereas all the earlier ones were calculated afterwards, and of course incorrectly, with the aid of the scientific means which then existed. For the first 240 years we have seven kings, who reigned for an immense time, most of them about forty years. Newton has already pointed out how improbable it was, that a succession of princes should have all ruled for so long a period, and he has assigned seventeen years as an average for each. The most exact parallel, however, is to be found among the doges of Venice, who also were elective princes like the Roman kings. There have been forty doges within the space of five centuries (800 to 1300), so that there were eight of these to a century. When we now look more closely at the numbers of the Roman kings, we find in them a play upon numbers, as among the eastern nations. To understand this, we must premise the following remarks.

The Etruscans had as the basis of their chronology two sorts of sæcula, physical and astronomical, of which the latter consisted of a hundred and ten years, as the received average number of the physical one. By a twofold intercalation, the calendar was rectified to within a wonderfully small fractional difference, a hundred and ten of these years very nearly corresponding to a hundred and thirty-two years of ten months; and thus an astronomical period was constituted. The length of the physical sæculum was thus fixed. The life of him who outlived all those who had been alive at the foundation of a state, marked the first sæculum; the second was determined by the longest life among those who were alive at the conclusion of the first, and so on. Now there is an old tradition in Plutarch and Dio Cassius, and in Dionysius at least an allusion to it, that Numa was born on the day of the foundation of Rome, and therefore the first sæculum at Rome probably ended with his death in the year 77.[35] If this was the case, we then see the reason why Romulus was made to reign thirty-eight years (the number of the weeks of the year of ten months), and Numa thirty-nine. For the last five kings one had historical traditions; yet they did not extend through the whole of the regal period. Rome has surely had by far more than five kings; but as a founder was wanted besides for the Ramnes, and another for the Tities, the number was chosen which had a sacred meaning, that of the planets, &c. The middle point in two hundred and forty years is the end of the hundred and twentieth, just the middle of the reign of the fourth king out of seven, evidently an artificial arrangement. Twenty-three years were given him, so that people might be able to begin to date them from the year 110, as they always wished for the beginning some distinguished number, and a hundred and ten was the sæcula number. The old year had ten months, and a hundred and thirty of those years are equal to a hundred and ten of the later ones. The reign of Ancus must therefore have been placed between 110 and 132. What is between 77 and 110, namely, thirty-two years, is now of course to be assigned to Tullus Hostilius. Tarquinius Priscus reigns until 170, half a century being added to the middle of the regal period; his reign therefore lasted thirty-eight years. The twenty-five years of the last king may be historical, or a quarter of a century may have been assigned to him in round numbers. For Servius Tullius there now remains the time from 170 to 215. But let us now suppose that the two reigns of Tarquinius Priscus and of Servius Tullius did not last so long, then every inconsistency vanishes, and the old unanimous account that Tarquinius Superbus was the son of Tarquinius Priscus reasserts its claims. We thus see how the greatest absurdities may arise from chronological restorations, as in this case there is a palpable forgery.

Although the other sources of the earliest history, the old lays, may not also have been tampered with, they are nevertheless altogether insufficient. We have a parallel case to this in our own Nibelungenlied, the poets of which likewise did not wish to deceive, nor did they make any pretensions whatever to be annalists. Historical characters appear in it,—Theodoric, Attila, the Burgundians; and yet of the whole poem nothing belongs to history. Nor has history any part in Romulus and Numa. They belong to the cycle of the gods, Romulus as the son of Mars, and Numa as the husband of Egeria; Romulus is merely a personification of Rome. Other poems have more historical matter in them; for instance, the Spanish romances of the Cid. Here the outlines are undoubtedly historical; but they form as it were a line only, whilst the description as given in the poem is a plane. There is also much of this in Roman history. He who utterly rejects the whole of the early Roman history, does not know what he is saying. Romulus and Numa are included within the first sæculum, because they do not at all belong to history; and therefore they form a sæculum of their own, and as it were quite a different era. From thence whatever was discovered of old traditions concerning the kings and their time, much of which was in circulation, had now its place assigned to it in the chronological cycle. Those who think this criticism doubtful, would not do so if they were more familiar with what is nearer our own times. It is well known how the romances of the middle ages about Charlemagne and his Paladins, refer to Latin chronicles the authorship of which is ascribed to the Archbishop Turpin. These are now allowed to figure as romances by the side of history; but who would believe that not a hundred and fifty years after Charlemagne, in the reign of Otho the Great, at a time therefore when the crusades were not yet in the remotest manner thought of, there appears already in the Chronicle of Benedict of Soracte a most detailed account of an expedition of Charlemagne to Jerusalem, and that without any consciousness of its falsehood. Before the extinction of the Carlovingian race, utterly fictitious expeditions across the Alps, &c., taken from the history of Charlemagne, are related at large in the Chronicles as positive facts. We are now able to disprove them, because we have contemporary annals, and the history of Eginhard; and as for the expedition to Jerusalem, even without these we may also disprove it from eastern annals.—The same thing occurs in Ireland. There also, pretended annals exist in which a succession of kings are found, among whom Niall the Great, about the time of the emperor Theodosius, conquers Britain, Gaul, and Spain, crosses the Alps, and threatens the emperor in Rome. The most decisive proof can be brought against this completely fabulous tale, as the authentic history in this case is generally known.[36] Had we likewise older books of history to check the Roman legends with, we might just as easily get the proof of the want of authenticity of the early Roman history. In the meanwhile where shall we find them? The Greeks had no intercourse with Rome, and although they knew of the Romans at a much earlier period than is generally supposed, yet they did not trouble themselves about them, precisely because they never came into contact with them. The case would be quite different with the Greeks of Southern Italy, and the Siceliotes, of whom we have, however, no more authors left. Neither Herodotus nor Thucydides can mention the Romans. There nevertheless exists a notice which gives one a sample of Roman history as it was told among other nations, quite a detached fragment of Etruscan history. The case is as follows,—Claudius, afterwards emperor, who was so unfortunate in his youth, who was disowned by his mother, and whose feeble understanding, in spite of his other good qualities, was entirely spoiled by ill-treatment, seems to have excited Livy’s pity, who gave him instruction and encouragement for writing history. Thus he wrote several works, Καρχηδονιακά, in eight, and Tυῤῥηνικά, in twenty books, certainly in Greek, the loss of which we have very much to regret. Even Pliny does no more quote this latter work. But in the sixteenth century two tablets were discovered, on which fragments of an oration of the emperor Claudius are found, wherein he proposes in the senate to give the Lugdunensian Gauls the full citizenship, and to admit them into the senate, as had long been the case already in the Provincia Romana. The inhabitants of Gaul were Roman citizens, had Roman names, yet they had not the right of admission into the senate. With this right the emperor Claudius presented Lugdunensian Gaul. The two brazen tablets are still left, out of several which contained the speech mentioned by Tacitus; and they either do not immediately join each other, or a considerable piece must be wanting at the bottom. Before the French Revolution they were still in the town hall at Lyons; whether they be still there, I know not. Lipsius had them printed in his edition of Tacitus, Gruter in the Corpus Inscriptionum; but yet they have been little read. They give us an idea of the stupidity of Claudius, so that we feel assured that the ancients have not done him injustice. In this harangue he says at full length what Tacitus very summarily condensed, that we ought not to say that this was an innovation. Innovations had been made from the beginning of the state; foreigners had ever been received, as for instance the Sabines of Titus Tatius. Even foreigners had been made kings—Numa; Tarquin the Etruscan, a descendant of the Greeks; Servius Tullius, who, according to our annals, was a Corniculensian, but according to the Tuscan ones was a Tuscan of the name of Mastarna, a follower of Cæles Vibenna. He emigrated and settled on the Mons Cælius, which was so called by him after the name of his leader, and now called himself Servius Tullius. This is therefore a direct proof of how matters stood at that time with regard to the Roman annals; for there is nothing whatever in which we can make this Etruscan Mastarna and Servius Tullius, the son of a bondwoman, tally with each other.

Undoubtedly therefore the earliest Roman history has sprung from lays. Perizonius quotes examples from other nations; even in the historical books of the Old Testament, there are such lays. With regard to the Romans, he cites the testimony of Cato, to which Cicero refers in two passages. “Would that the lays were still in existence;” Cicero writes, “for as Cato says, they were sung at table by the guests in praise of deceased men!” A third mention we find in Nonius Marcellus from Varro, that at banquets pueri honesti sang lays in praise of departed great men, either to the flute, or without any accompaniment. This evidence every one must acknowledge as authentic. Among all the nations of whose peculiar original early literature we can form any judgment, there are found either longer historical poems of the epic class, or else very short ones in praise of individual men. In order to pave the way for the assertion that we have still pieces left of both from the Romans, we must first premise some remarks on their most ancient metres.

The ancient Romans, before they adopted the Greek poetic system, made use of the Saturnian verse. Horace says of it,

Horridus ille

Defluxit numerus Saturnius

and several old grammarians have given accounts of it. Atilius Fortunatianus and others among them, who knew nothing about its structure, stuck to a couple of verses which had been preserved; particularly to the following, in which, according to the views which then prevailed, a hypercatalectical Senarius makes its appearance:

Malum dabunt Metelli Nævio Poëtæ.

Terentianus Maurus, who belongs to the end of the third century, speaks of it when treating of the Anacreontic verse, because the first division of the Saturnian bears some resemblance to it. But the real Saturnian verse is quite a different one, which I intend shortly to prove in a detailed treatise. It has many forms, and is altogether distinct from Greek metres. The Latin term for Rhythmus, which in later times only was applied to Greek metres, is numeri. But the Greek metre is based on music and quantity, while in theirs the Romans really counted, the syllables being little measured, or rather not at all: a certain degree of rhythm was, however, kept. Our ancestors, in the same way, had no idea of short and long syllables in the Greek manner; and in the old Latin church hymns likewise short syllables are made long, and vice versa. Plautus and Terence also, in their iambic and trochaic verses, really observed the ryhthmical measure only, and not the quantity. This is the case with all northern people. The pervading characteristic of the Saturnian verse is this, that it must consist of a fixed number of trisyllabic feet. Generally speaking there are four of them, in which either Bacchics or Cretics interchange with Spondees. Sometimes the Cretics and sometimes the Bacchics predominate. When kept distinct they have a very fine movement; but they are usually very much mingled together, so that it is difficult to make them out.

These verses, found from the very earliest times, are quite analogous to the Persian, Arabian, and to our own old German and northern ones, and also to those of the Anglo-Saxon, and to all in which alliteration prevails. The old German verse is divided into two halves, in the first of which two words begin with the same consonant, which once more occurs again in the second, and it has four beats. In the old Saxon Harmony of the Gospels there is this quadruple measure, and likewise in Otfrid and others; but five or six measures may also be found. In Persian poetry there are uniformly four feet of three syllables each; in Arabic this is often the case, but not unseldom there are quadrisyllabic ones also. Exactly agreeing with these are the Spanish coplas de arte major, which were in use before the introduction of the Alexandrine, and have also passed into the Flemish. In all probability this metre was also used in the longer poems of the Provençal. This old Roman syllabic measure is universal in the Roman poems down to the seventh century. I have found a long string of them, and a chapter of an old grammarian with fragments of wonderful beauty, principally from Nævius. This important treatise on the Saturnian verse I shall publish. For this grammarian has really understood that metre,[37] which in Plautus is worked up to a high degree of beauty.

There are also shorter old poems in this measure. At the funerals of the Romans, Neniæ, as they were called, were sung to the flute, which were not doleful sentimental songs, but must have been of the same character as the Laudationes. The dead had now passed over to their illustrious ancestors; their glory was made the theme of pride and exultation; and therefore in these Neniæ praise was simply given them. When Horace says, absint inani funere neniæ, &c. this refers, if there was any singing at all at funerals, to the dirges of the later age. The Romans were not originally tender-hearted. They made even the dead man of use to the State, and from the grave itself he exhorted others to follow him in his deeds. Neniæ and Laudationes were therefore quite plain and simple, in that old style which did not yet know of any construction of periods, and they are no way to be compared to the λόγοι ἐπιτάφιοι in Thucydides and the later Greeks. Two such poems are evidently still preserved to us, in the tombs of the Scipios, which were discovered in 1780, by the Appian road. The upper story, where the sarcophagus of the younger Africanus and the statue of Ennius were, is wanting; but the lower one, which was scooped out of the hill side, was found choked up with rubbish. Here was the sarcophagus of L. Scipio Barbatus, who had been a consul in the fifth century (454). At an earlier period,[38] this tomb had been already entered from the top, and a tablet taken out, which is now built into the wall of the Barberini palace; yet this had fallen into oblivion. The bodies of the Cornelii down to Sylla were not burned in the Pelasgian, or Greek manner, but buried in coffins. On these noble sarcophagi there are verses, written indeed like prose, but divided by dashes; and on the sarcophagus of the son the verses are even arranged in lines. That they are verses is to be seen from their unequal length, as otherwise the Romans always wrote every line to its full length. These are quite plain and simple verses, yet there is still some metre in them.

Cornéliu’ Lúciu’ Scípio Barbátus,

Gnáivo prognátu’, fortis vír sapiénsque—

Consúl, censor, aédilis, quí fuit apúd vos, etc.

These are surely the Neniæ which were sung at the time, and then inscribed on the tomb. The old songs at the banquets, were for the most part quite as simple.

Now these Neniæ, together with the Laudationes kept in the Atrium, are sources for the earliest history. There were besides some longer epic poems among the Romans, as well as among other people; for instance, the Servians, &c. The modern Greek songs are only of a lyrical description, but those of the Servians are a combination of the epic with the lyric. A fragment of an heroic poem of this kind on the combat of the Horatii and Curatii, I think I have discovered in Livy. Now it is not by any means to be supposed that Livy had still seen these old heroic poems, and written from them; but he wrote, either directly or indirectly, through Varro, from the books of the pontiffs and augurs, in which very many fragments of such ancient epic lays were preserved; many of them dating even from the time of the taking of the city. In the passage of Livy alluded to, wherein the appeal to the people is related, which he had taken from these books, he speaks of lex horrendi carminis. The formulas of that time were, however, called carmina, and were written in the old measure. That Livy has indirectly or directly borrowed from these books is so much the more certain, as Cicero asserts, that the formula of the provocatio ad populum was contained in the libri augurales. The formula is

Duúmviri pérduelliónem júdicent, &c.

in which the old metre is still to be recognised.

That Cicero’s assertion, laudationibus historia nostra facta est mendosior, is acknowledged also by Livy, has been already remarked. For as every thing good may easily be turned to evil, that lofty feeling of family pride which the Romans had was also liable to be perverted, and we may well believe that saying.

After the first scanty notices from the earlier times were for the most part destroyed in the Gallic devastation, they were restored from outlines taken from the songs of the Vates; the poems were changed in passing from mouth to mouth, and from these combined with the Laudationes history arose. These are the materials which Fabius found extant.

If we look at the tenth book of Livy, we find in it a disproportionate prolixity in the account of the campaigns of Fabius Maximus Rullianus. Now this is exactly an instance of a story taken from family records. In fact not a few statements may even be pointed out, which have no other source than family vanity. People even ventured to interpolate fictitious consulships and triumphs into the family annals, as Livy himself tells us.

Again, other falsifications have arisen from national pride. The forgeries of patriotism manifest themselves among the Romans whenever they suffered great disasters; and this is particularly the case with the momentous ones of the earlier time, with the war of Porsena, the Gallic calamity, and the disgrace at Caudium, in which the whole account is a lying one. Others have sprung from that spirit of caste, which in earlier times led to continual struggles. Both parties thus brought false accusations against each other, which afterwards found their way into history; or, on the other hand, palliation was also attempted in order to disguise political or moral crimes. The blame of the worst events is laid to the people’s charge; yet it is innocent, and the guilt belongs wholly to its antagonists. Not the people, but the Curies condemned Manlius to death; these also pronounced the disgraceful decision between the Ardeates and the people of Aricia;[39] nay, we may be sure that it was the Curies which compelled Camillus to go into exile.

Such falsifications accumulate, become involved in each other, and give rise to this strange confusion. The rich materials, widely scattered indeed, because the parties did not allow of their being brought together, we may gather in order to find out by critical research the organization and the nature of the Roman nation; and on the whole to carry on their history to that point at which contemporary accounts from the Greeks begin, to the war with Pyrrhus, and the first Punic war. Much will indeed remain undecided in these inquiries; but we may exactly discriminate where this must needs be the case, and where it is otherwise.

THE EARLIEST HISTORY.

The Roman history goes back to Latium, and through Latium to Troy. Since Dio Chrysostom has started the question, whether Troy ever existed at all, a vast deal has been written on the subject; and also upon this other point, whether Æneas came to Italy. The treatise of Theodore Ryckius[40] about it is particularly well known. He deems the arrival of Æneas to be historical, in opposition to Bochart, who is one of the last highly gifted French philologists,[41] and at all events is superior to him in discernment. Bochart’s hypothesis concerning the influence of the Phœnicians, is doubtless carried too far. No one, however, will now any more put the question thus; but one must ask, has the legend that the Trojans came to this coast any historical foundation? and, moreover, has the legend arisen among the Greeks, and passed over to Italy; or is it a native Italian tradition which cannot, at least by us, be traced back to Greek sources? If the latter be the case, some truth must surely be at the bottom of it, and the less one takes these ancient accounts in their literal meaning, the more are they found to partake of possibility.

There is no question but that in the earliest times there were in Greece two peoples who were very nearly akin, but still distinct from each other; so much so that they did not understand each other’s language, as Herodotus positively asserts. One of these languages as opposed to the other was considered as barbarous; and yet, when looked upon from a different point of view, they may be said to be both of them closely related. There are still several living languages which stand in a similar degree of affinity,—the Polish and the Bohemian, the Italian and the Spanish, and, although we may not find the relationship to be so close, the Polish and Lithuanian. The two last languages are as wide as heaven and earth asunder; yet for all that they have a characteristic similarity. The grammar of both has the same development, the same peculiarities; the numerals are nearly the same; a great many words are common to both. These languages are therefore branches of the same stock, and yet the Poles do not understand the Lithuanians. Now this is the manner in which we solve the question so often mooted concerning the difference or identity of the Greeks and the Pelasgians. When Herodotus says that they were different, we must after all believe him; yet, on the other hand, he places the Hellenes and Pelasgians again side by side. The two nations cannot therefore be of different race.

In the earliest times, when the Greek history is yet veiled to us in impenetrable mystery, the greater part of Italy, perhaps the whole eastern shore of the Adriatic sea, Epirus, Macedon,[42] the southern coast of Thrace, the Macedonian peninsulas, the islands of the Ægean, and also the coasts of Asia Minor to the Bosporus were inhabited by Pelasgians.[43] The Trojans also are to be looked upon as Pelasgians. That they were no barbarians is the opinion of all the Greeks, as we also see already from Homer; their abode is quite in the Pelasgian country; their names are Greek. They are in close conjunction at one time with the Arcadians, another essentially Pelasgian people, then with the Epirots, then also with the Thessalians; and Æneas, according to one tradition, goes to Arcadia and dies there, according to another into Epirus, where Helenus settles. Thus, in like manner, we find in Pindar, in the poem on Cyrene, Aristæus, a Pelasgian hero from Arcadia, together with the Antenorides. The connexion of the Pelasgians with the Trojans extends very far. Samothrace in particular is the metropolis of Ilium; Dardanus comes from Arcadia, but passes through Samothrace, and from thence, married to Chryse, goes to Troas. The Samothracians, according to one of the grammarians, are a Roman people, acknowledged to be of kindred race with the Romans; that is to say, with the Troio-Tyrrhenian Pelasgians. This connexion has no other source but the common relationship between the Tyrrhenians, Trojans, and Samothracians. According to some accounts, Dardanus comes from Tyrrhenia to Troas; according to others, the Trojans come to Tyrrhenia. In the temple, and in the mysteries of Samothrace, there was a gathering point of many men from all quarters;[44] and it was for a great part of the world at that time as the Caaba of Mecca, the grave of the prophet at Medina, or as the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem. Samothrace and Dodona were for the Pelasgian races, what perhaps to the Hellenic world Delphi and Delos were. The distance of a considerable portion of those who are linked together by a common origin ought not to have much stress laid upon it in a case like this, as it is such as not to hinder the Mahometan from making the pilgrimage to the sacred spot.

This old stock of the Pelasgians which we may trace as far as Liguria, and which also dwelt on the coasts of Corsica and Sardinia, vanishes in the age of history as a component part of nations; but it consisted originally of a number of tribes which bore different names. A very wide spread name for that portion which was settled in Epirus, and in the southern part of modern Italy, as far as Latium and the coast of the Adriatic Sea, was that of Siculians (Siculi); also Vituli, Vitelli, Vitali, Itali, from the last of which Italy takes its name. Notwithstanding the wide spread of these Siculian or Italian names, Italia in the earliest times does not seem as at present to have designated the country to the foot of the Alps. It is indeed possible that the changes which followed upon the immigration of northern races severed the sea-coast from Etruria, and confined the name Italia to the country south of the Tiber, or rather, south of Latium. Yet this is only a supposition, though it is certain that Italy was once bounded on the north by a line from the Garganus on one side to Terracina on the other; and that the name, which had been restricted to within yet narrower limits in the times after Alexander the Great, before the sway of Rome had begun, was again extended to that wider range. It is probably of this earlier Italy that Pliny says, that it was querno folio similis,—a remarkable example of the manner in which Pliny wrote. He speaks at one time in his own name, and at another he gives excerpta. Yet his excerpta are unfortunately as little weighed by him in historical matters as in those of natural history. This statement he has without doubt taken from Timæus, with whom also the comparison of Sardinia to a sandal or a foot-print originates. That in his own time Italy could not by any means be so described, entirely escaped Pliny’s notice.

In the south of Italy, the earliest inhabitants were also called Œnotrians and Peucetians; in the north, without doubt they were likewise called Liburnians; and on the coasts of Latium, Tyrrhenians.

Whether the settlements on the coast north of the Tiber were the remnants of an expelled people, or perhaps mere colonies, can no longer now be ascertained; yet there appear in the middle of Italy, besides those people which were akin to the Greeks, some of a different kind by whom the former indeed were crushed. It seems that those migrations of the different races came about in the same manner as those in modern history. The people which directly precipitates itself upon the Siculians in Latium, and the Italians in Southern Italy proper, partly expelling, and partly absorbing and assimilating them, are the Opicans (Opici), a mixed race, which in fact as Opicans exists only in a few places, but is again absorbed by another people, and produces new tribes. They are the same whom we meet with under the name of Apulians; for the terminations, -icus and -ulus are equivalent. The Italian population therefore ends in Apulia; though it reaches in appearance as far as into Messapia, where part only of the Italians maintained themselves in an isolated settlement. Moreover they were in Samnium, Campania, and on the borders of Latium as Volscians and Æquians.

These Opicans were in their turn pushed forward by the Sabines (Sabellians), who called themselves aborigines, and traced their source from the highest Alps of Abruzzo near Majella and Gran Sasso d’Italia. Cato in a somewhat extraordinary manner makes them come from Little Amiternum. Whether the Sabellians and Opicans were about as distinct from each other as the Gauls and Ligurians; or in a less degree, like the Celts and Cymri; or whether they belonged to the same stock, and were only politically separated; are questions which we cannot solve. The ancients knew not, nor did they care much about it. When we want to see at any rate where no historical light is to be had, the mind’s eye is dimmed like that of the body when it is violently strained in the dark. Varro indeed distinguishes the Sabine from the Oscan language; but as he was very little of a judge of the earlier languages, in the sense in which we should apply the term to W. von Humboldt, we have also very little reason to rely upon any of his statements concerning the relationship of languages. From a general analogy, I conceive that the tide of emigration must have set in in several streams, and that thus the Sabines also may have been carried down from the higher north by its first rush. Yet this is mere conjecture.

The Umbrians may have belonged to the same stock as the Opicans. I would not lay too great a stress on the resemblance of names; the races which are nearest akin to each other have very often the most dissimilar names, and those which are the most remote quite similar ones. Thus the Getæ and the Goths were for a long time mistaken for the same people. Fifty years ago, it was the general belief in Ireland and Scotland that the Fir-Bolgs[45] were the old Belgians; yet this is false, and they are a Danish colony, as a very well-informed Englishman wrote to me. If I had no other reasons but the names, I should hesitate to pronounce for the identity of the Opicans and Umbrians. But Philistus called the people which overcame the Siculians in Latium, Ombricans, and the affinity of the languages may also be clearly made out from what remains of them.

These changes of the population, in which the earlier inhabitants are dislodged by another tribe, and the latter by some other one in its turn, make the history of the old Italian nations so indescribably obscure and difficult for us. At a time which we cannot fix with chronological certainty, in what was afterwards called Latium, which, however, perhaps bore this name from the earliest times, there existed a population of Siculians. The memory of it was preserved at Tibur, where according to Cato part of the town was called Siculio.[46] There are also elsewhere very many allusions in ancient authors, which place it beyond doubt that this people once existed there. Under the same name we find it in Southern Italy, and in the island which is to this day still called after them. According to one tradition, Sicelus came from Latium to the Œnotrians; according to another, the Siculians under different names were driven from their old abodes by the Opicans or Ombricans, and removed to that island. This migration is merely indicative of the combinations of those who tried to explain the contemporary existence of the same people in Latium and in Sicily. Possible it is, but it is also possible that it took quite a different direction. It is certain that in Homer’s time there were Siculians in Southern Italy; to prove which fact there exists a passage from Mnaseas, a pupil of Aristarchus, a learned grammarian and historian, whom the scholiast of the Odyssey quotes. He also says, that Echetus in Epirus was prince of the Siculians, so that he likewise acknowledged this name in those parts. From his explanation, we see that the poet of the Odyssey, when speaking of Siculians, does not mean the inhabitants of Sicily, a country concerning which he was in the dark; but those of Southern Italy, or the Pelasgians of Epirus.

The Siculians are the same as those whom Cato calls Aborigines. This name is interpreted γενάρχαι, ancestors; or also, wanderers, aberrigines; and likewise those who are from the very beginning, ab origine. The nominative singular, according to the Latin idiom, must have been aboriginus. There was a tradition that Latium had originally been inhabited by Autochthones; but Cato and C. Sempronius[47] said, that the aborigines had emigrated from Achaia, by which was meant the whole of the Peloponnesus, then named by the Romans Achaia. Others called the different places which were formerly termed Siculian, Argive; and Cato had done that with regard to Tibur itself. Argos and Larissa are Pelasgian names, which we meet with wherever there are Pelasgians;—Argos probably meaning town, and Larissa borough. As long as the Peloponnesus was Pelasgian, it was called Argos; even so was Thessaly. In this meaning the Argives are Pelasgians, and the Ἀργεῖοι Πελασγοί are in the old tragedy always named in conjunction. The one was most likely the general, and the other the special appellation.

Hesiod says of Latinus, πᾶσι Τυῤῥηνοῖσιν ἀγακλειτοῖσιν ἀνάσσει. All that we know of the Latins is this, that they had a number of towns from Tibur to the river Tiber. How far they extended in the earliest time to the Liris is lost in obscurity. Cato (in Priscian) says, that the plain of the Volscians formerly belonged to the aborigines; certainly all the towns along the coast were at an early period Tyrrhenian, as Antium, Circeii, and many others. At that time, therefore, the name of Latium spread far, and so late as immediately after the Roman kings, even to Campania; it having been first limited in consequence of the great popular migrations soon after the expulsion of the kings. Hesiod of course refers to the earlier time. In the treaty of Rome with Carthage, the coast beyond Terracina, probably as far as Cumæ, was called Latium, and the inhabitants Latins.

By the Greeks the Pelasgian inhabitants of the whole western coast of Italy were called Tyrrhenians; by the Latins, Turini, Tusci, i. e. Tusici from Tusus, or Turus; for s in the ancient language stands for r, as in Fusius for Furius.

We must bear well in mind that the Pelasgians and Aborigines are one and the same people. If we look over the legends of nations, we repeatedly find the same stories told in different ways which are entirely opposed to each other. The story of a Jew who takes ruthless revenge upon a Christian, as we know it from Shakspeare, in a Roman novel shortly before his time, is found just reversed, so that the Christian wants to cut off the flesh from the Jew. The migrations of the Goths, according to some, proceed from Scandinavia to the south; according to others, from the south to Scandinavia. Wittikind says that the Saxons had come out of Britain into Germany; the usual account makes them out to have been invited thither from Germany. The Pelasgians near the Hymettus near Athens are represented to have come from Tyrrhenia to Athens, and from thence to Lemnos; in another tradition, the Tyrrhenians go from the Meonian coast to Italy. Thus Cyrene, according to one legend, is colonized from Thera; in another, Thera rises out of a clod of earth from Libya. In the earlier account, the Symplegades were in the Eastern Sea, and the Argo sails through them on her voyage out; in the later, they are in the Western Sea, and impede the progress of the Argo on her voyage home. This exchange of polarity is manifested also with regard to the aborigines. In spite of etymology, Dionysius so calls the people which, issuing from the interior of the country, conquered the ancient inhabitants. Varro did the same, and yet worse than Pliny. He had read an immense deal; but learned he ought not to be called on account of his confusedness.[48] Varro knows about the close alliance of two of the Latin nations, but he makes a jumble of every thing; the aborigines are for him the conquering, and the Siculians the conquered people. Then, following Hellanicus, he brings over the aborigines from Thessaly; yet they then migrate from the Upper Anio to the Upper Abruzzo, whither they are driven by the Sabines. This tradition has a local and plausible character; for there were many small towns to be found there: large cities, on the contrary, such as the Etruscans possessed, are always a proof of immigration, as the immigrating people rather settles in a few considerable places. Trent and several other cities are large Lombard colonies. Dionysius may be excused, as he relies on Varro’s authority; the latter alone is answerable for the mistake. Here also the designation of the people, the conquering and the conquered one, is confounded.

The conquerors were probably called Cascans. This name Servius has preserved from Saufeius, a grammarian who seems to belong to the first century of the Christian era. They are also met with under the name of Sacranians, and to this the expression in Dionysius refers, that it had been a ἱερὰ νεότης. Part of the people which under the name of Opicans and Oscans inhabited the interior of Italy, or was more likely pushed down from the north, and wedged in between the old Pelasgian places, settled in the Apennines round the lake Fusinus (at present called Celano), towards Reate. Their chief town was called Lista: they bordered on the Siculians, who inhabited the country as far as beyond Tibur. There was a legend concerning them, that in the war with the Sabines, who had already taken from them Reate, and were driving them before them further and further, they had made a vow of a ver sacrum. This custom of the Italian nations when evil times befel them, was kept up also among the Romans. It was vowed to consecrate to the gods all cattle, in short, all that should be produced in the ensuing spring; and to send out in colonies the male children born at that period, as soon as ever they were grown up: the produce was either to be offered up, or redeemed. Thus devoted, the Sacranians marched against Latium, and subjected to themselves the Siculians. In Latium they settled among the old inhabitants, and became united with them into one people, which received the name of Prisci Latini; for, the Cascans must also have been called Prisci. To take Prisci Latini in Livy for Old Latins would be an absurdity: he has borrowed the formula of the declaration of war by the Fetiales, in which the expression first occurs, from the ancient rituals; it goes back to the time of Ancus Marcius, whilst before that of Tarquin the Proud, there were certainly no Latin colonies which we may suppose to have been placed in opposition to the rest of the people. Prisci Latini stands for Prisci et Latini, as the Latin language always expresses two necessary contra-positions, or two notions inseparably combined, by an immediate juxtaposition of the two words. The earliest Romans made as little use of cement in their language, as in their buildings. Brissonius has very clearly shown this, and has thereby fixed the formula Populus Romanus Quirites; only that he goes too far when he asserts that Populus Romanus Quiritium had never been said, which has been justly controverted by J. F. Gronovius. In the same manner, patres conscripti, instead of qui patres, quique conscripti sunt; and in legal forms, locati conducti, emti venditi, &c. Priscus and Cascus mean in after times very old, quaint, as Gothic or old Franconian, do in German; hence we have casce loqui, vocabula casca.—These conquerors spoke Oscan; and from the fusion of their language with the Siculo-Pelasgian arose that extraordinary medley which we call Latin, in which the grammar in some measure, but still more the etymology, contains such a considerable Greek element; a subject on which O. Müller has made those fine enquiries in the first volume of his Etruscans. The ancient Oscan language still exists in some old monuments: in Pompeii and Herculaneum, there are a couple of inscriptions, and the tablet of Bantia (Oppido) may be fully interpreted. Of the two elements in Latin, that which is Greek and that which is not, the latter agrees with the Oscan language. All the words which refer to agriculture, domestic animals, fruits, &c., are either Greek or akin to Greek. We evidently see a conquered agricultural people, and a conquering one from the mountains which was not engaged in agriculture.

From henceforth the trace of the tradition is lost to us, being effaced by the account of the Trojan immigration. This legend has no authenticity whatever, and is merely a later figment to express the relationship between the Trojans and the Latins as Pelasgians. The story of a Trojan colony is found on so many points of Italy, that it is by mere chance that this legend has been more definitely fixed upon Latium; and it was fostered by the wide circulation of the Greek poems, which spread much farther than we generally think.

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.

From this beautiful poem the falsifiers tried to make out something credible; even the unprejudiced and poetical Livy sets aside as much as possible whatever was most marvellous. But the falsifiers went yet a step beyond. In those days when no one any more believed in the ancient deities, they sought to discover something rational in the old legends; and thus they here got up a story which Plutarch received with predilection, and which Dionysius also does not disdain, who, however, likewise relates the old legend in a mutilated form. Dionysius says that many people believed in demons, and that such a demon might forsooth be the father of Romulus. Yet he himself is far from believing in it. On the contrary, his version is that Amulius had in disguise offered violence to Rea Silvia, playing off conjuror’s tricks of thunder and lightning; that he had done so in order to have a pretext for doing away with her, but had then been asked by his daughter not to drown her, and had thereupon imprisoned her for life; that the herdsman whom he commissioned to expose the children, had preserved them at the entreaty of Numitor, and put two others in their stead; and that Numitor’s grandsons had been taken to a guest-friend at Gabii, who had educated them according to their rank, and caused them to be instructed in Greek literature. It was really attempted to introduce this into history; and indeed some of the details of this silly story have found their way into the narrative of the historians, e. g. that the old Alban nobility had emigrated with the two brothers to Rome. Had this been the case, no asylum would have been wanting, and it would not have been necessary to obtain the connubium with the other nations by force.

More historically important on the other hand is the difference of opinion between the two brothers concerning the building of the city, and the spot on which it is to be founded. According to the old legend, both are equally heads of the colony, both of them kings. Romulus is generally stated to have wished to build on the Palatine; and Remus is said by some to have decided in favour of the Aventine, by others, of the Remuria. This is, according to Plutarch, a hill three miles south of Rome, and can be no other than the eminence which lies obliquely from St. Paul’s; and this is the more likely, as this hill, though in a country elsewhere very unhealthy, is remarkable for the healthiness of the air,—a very important consideration in researches concerning the old Latin towns; as it may safely be inferred, that where the air is now wholesome, it was also the same at that time, and that where it is now unwholesome, it was then no better. The general account of tradition is that a quarrel had arisen between Romulus and Remus, as to which of the two should give the name to the city, as well as where it was to be built. Without doubt there also existed therefore on that hill a town called Remuria; and at a subsequent period we find this name transferred to the Aventine, as was so often done. According to the common story, Auguries were to decide the matter. Romulus watched on the Palatine, Remus on the Aventine. The latter watched the whole of the night, but saw nothing; towards sunrise he saw six vultures flying from the north to the south, and he sent word to Romulus. But his brother, vexed that no sign had appeared to him, fraudulently sent him a message that he had seen twelve vultures; and in fact, at the very moment when the messenger of Romulus reached Remus, twelve vultures made their appearance, and these he claimed for himself. This is, however, impossible; for as the Palatine and the Aventine lie so near each other, every Roman only knew too well, that whatever any one saw high in the air on either of the two mountains, could not in any way escape notice on the other. The legend cannot therefore be old: it is only to be upheld by substituting Remuria for the Aventine. As the Palatine was the seat of the noblest patrician tribe, and the Aventine exclusively the city of the plebeians, there reigned between the two an undying enmity; and thus in aftertimes that scene was transferred from the Remuria, which was far off from the city, to the Aventine. According to Ennius, the Aventine was the very spot from which Romulus watched the heavens, so that the station of Remus must have been at Remuria, and Romulus, when he had observed the Augury, threw his javelin towards the Palatine. This is the old tradition which the later authors neglected. He takes possession of the Palatine. That the javelin took root, and grew into a tree which stood to the time of Nero, is symbolical of the imperishableness of the new city, and of the help of the gods. That Romulus had played false, is a later addition: the fine poem of Ennius in Cicero de Divinatione[54] knows nothing of the circumstance. From hence it now follows that in the earliest times there were two towns, Roma and Remuria; the latter a good way outside the city, and far from the Palatine.

Romulus now drew the boundaries of his city; but Remus leaped in mockery over the ditch, for which Celer slew him, an intimation that no one should step with impunity over the bulwarks of Rome. Romulus, however, fell into grief on the death of Remus, instituted festivals for him, and caused an empty throne to be raised at the side of his own. Thus we have a double rule, which ends with the overthrow of Remuria.

The next question is, what were these two cities,—Roma and Remuria? They were evidently Pelasgian towns. There is an old tradition, that Sicelus had come from Roma on the south to the Pelasgians; that is to say, the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians are driven to the Morgetians in Lucania and in the island, who were allied to them in blood. Among the Greeks, according to Dionysius, the belief was general that Rome was a Pelasgian, i. e. a Tyrrhenian city; but the writers from whom he had this information are lost to us. There is a fragment, however, in which it is stated that Rome was a sister-town of Antium and Ardea. We have also to quote here the notice from the Chronicle of Cumæ, that Evander had had his palatium on the Palatine. As an Arcadian he is likewise a Pelasgian. To us he appears less important than he is in the legend: he is one of the benefactors of the people, and to the Pelasgians in Italy he brought the use of letters and the arts, as Damaratus did to the Tyrrhenians in Etruria. In this meaning, therefore, Rome is indeed a Latin town; and that not a mixed, but a purely Tyrrheno-Pelasgian one. The after fortunes of this settlement are indicated in the allegories.

Romulus found the band which he had with him much too small. To the numbers of three thousand foot and three hundred horsemen, which Livy got from the Commentarii Pontificum, no regard should be given; for this is merely the sketch of the later Roman military array, dated back to the earliest times. According to the old tradition, his little troop was too small for him, and he opened an asylum on the Capitol. This asylum, according to the old description, only took in a very small space; a proof that these things were not at all understood as history. Therein were all sorts of people gathered together,—thieves, murderers, in short, rogues and vagabonds. This is the simple account of the way in which clientship began. In the bitterness with which the different classes afterwards regarded each other, this has been applied to the Patricians, as though their earliest ancestors had been scoundrels. But the Patricians would naturally be deemed descendants of the free companions of Romulus. Those who took refuge there are men who placed themselves as dependants under the protection of the really free citizens. But wives were now wanting to them, and they tried to get the right of intermarriage (connubium) with the neighbouring towns; especially perhaps with Antemnæ, which was only four (Roman) miles distant from Rome, with the Sabines and others. This was refused. Romulus, therefore, had recourse to stratagem: he gave out that he had discovered the altar of Consus, the god of counsel, an allegory to denote his usual craftiness. In the midst of the festival, the Sabine maidens were carried away, thirty in number; for this is the genuine old tradition, a proof how small people pictured to themselves old Rome to have been. From these the Curies received their names. Afterwards the number was found to be too little; and it was cunningly made out that these thirty had been chosen by the drawing of lots to give their names to the Curies, and Valerius Antias fixes the numbers of those who were carried off at five hundred and twenty-seven. The Rape is placed in the fourth month of the city, because the Consualia were kept in August, and the festival in commemoration of the foundation of the city in April; afterwards it was made four years later, as by Cn. Gellius, and Dionysius finds this much more worthy of belief. Wars arise from it; first with the neighbouring towns, which yielded one after the other; at last with the Sabines. There is no trace in the old tradition of the latter having been carried on to any length; yet in later times it was necessary to assume it, because another standard was then adopted. Lucumo and Cælius march forth to join Romulus, an allusion to the inroad of Cæles Vibenna, which, however, took place much later. Tatius, by means of treason, gains a settlement on the hill which was called the Tarpeian stronghold. Between the Palatine and the Tarpeian rock an indecisive battle is fought, until at length the Sabine women threw themselves between the combatants, and the strife was put an end to by an agreement that the rule should be shared between the Romans and the Sabines. This happened according to the annals in the fourth year. But it lasted a short time only; Tatius was slain at a sacrifice at Laurentum, and his throne was left vacant. Before that time, each king had a senate of a hundred members, which after having deliberated separately, joined together in what was called a comitium. Romulus reigned alone all the remaining time. The old legend knows nothing of his having been a tyrant: on the contrary, according to Ennius, he continued to be a mild and benevolent king, and Tatius was a tyrant. The ancient tradition had nothing more than the beginning and the end of the reign of Romulus: all that lies between, the war with the Veientines, Fidenates, &c. are silly stories of the later annalists; and whilst the poem itself is beautiful, this narrative is quite tasteless. It says, for instance, that Romulus slew with his own hand ten thousand Veientines, and more of the same stuff. The old poem proceeds at once to the period when Romulus fulfils his career, and when to Mars the promise given him by Jupiter was granted, that Romulus might be the only man whom he should dare to introduce among the gods. According to this ancient story, the king once reviewed his army at the marsh of Capræ, when, as at the time of his conception, an eclipse of the sun came on; and then likewise arose a whirlwind, in which Mars rode down in a chariot of fire, and took him up with him to heaven. From this beautiful lay, the most pitiful interpretations were wrested. It was said that Romulus had been among the senators, who had stabbed him, cut him in pieces, and carried him off beneath their togas. This silly story has become the general one. In order that a cause for such a deed of horror might not be wanting, it was now told that Romulus in his latter days had become a tyrant, and that the senators had revenged themselves upon him in this manner.

After the death of Romulus, there was for a long time a feud between the Romans and the people of Tatius; the Sabines wishing for a king from among themselves, since no new election had been made to fill the room of Tatius, whilst the Romans would have one of their own race. Then, it is said, it was at last agreed that one people was to elect the king from the other people.

And here we must speak of the relation of the two nations to each other, as it in reality existed.

All the nations of antiquity lived in fixed forms, and their political communities were always organized, down to the lowest ranks. When cities rise into nations, we always find at first a division into tribes. Herodotus mentions such tribes when Cyrene was colonized, and in later times this was also the case at the founding of Thurii; yet when a city any where existed as such, its claim to this character consisted in this, that its citizens were at a certain time divided into communities (γένη), which had a common chapel and the worship of a common hero. In the higher stages of these organizations, the clans were also in certain numerical proportions united into Curies (φράτραι). These clans are not families, but free associations, sometimes close, sometimes open; and in certain cases the general assembly of the state might assign them new members; as in Venice the great council was a close body, and it was so likewise in many of the oligarchical states of antiquity.

All the communities had a council and a commonalty, that is to say, a small and a great council, or a council and a popular assembly, the latter of which consisted of the guilds or clans; and these again were united as it were into parishes. The Latin towns have all a council of a hundred persons. This was divided into ten decuries; and these gave rise to the term decurions, which was continued to the latest times for the magistrates of the towns, and also passed by the lex Julia into the constitution of the Italian municipalities. That this council consisted of a hundred persons is shown by Savigny in the first volume of his history of Roman jurisprudence. This constitution survived until late in the middle ages, and was abolished when corporations of the different trades came into the place of the municipal constitution. Giovanni Villani says, that before the revolution in the twelfth century there had been in Florence a hundred buoni uomini, who managed the affairs of the town. There is nothing in our German cities corresponding to this constitution. We must not consider these hundred as gentlemen; but they were, as in the small free cities of the empire, an assembly of the burghers and husbandmen, each representing a clan. They are called by Propertius patres pelliti. The Curia at Rome, which was thatched with straw (recens horrebat regia culmo in Virgil), was a faithful remembrance of the times when Rome, buried in what may be deemed the night of history, stood like a small country town surrounded by its fields.

The earliest event which we are enabled to make out from the forms of allegory, by comparison with what happened in other places in Italy, is a consequence of the continued great movement of the different races. It did not stop when the Oscans were driven from the Fucinus to the Alban Lake; it went much farther. The Sabines may have rested for some time, but they pressed on far beyond the countries of which we have traditions. They begin as one of the smallest of peoples, and become afterwards one of the greatest in Italy. The Marrucinians, Caudinians, Vestinians, Marsians, Pelignians, in short all the Samnite peoples; the Lucanians, the Oscan part of the Bruttians, the Picenians and others, have all sprung from the Sabine stock: and yet we have traditions only about the founding of some of them. This people was down to the period at which we must fix the foundation of Rome, in a state of expansion. It is said the Sabines, guided by a bullock, had advanced into Opica, and had thus founded the country of the Samnites. Yet earlier perhaps, they had moved down below the Tiber, so that we there find Sabine towns mixed with Latin ones; and we meet with some of them also on the banks of the Anio. Into the country of the later Sabines, they in all likelihood only came subsequently; for Falerii is a Tuscan town, and certainly its population had once been entirely Tyrrhenian.

At the advance of the Sabines, some of the Latin towns maintained their ground, others gave way. Fidenæ belongs to the former class: north of it all is Sabine. Now we find at the side of Old Roma a Sabine town on the Quirinal and Capitoline, hard by the Latin one; yet the existence of this town is all that we know of it. A tradition is extant, that before that there had once been a Siculian town, Saturnia,[55] on the Capitoline; this then must have been conquered by the Sabines. Whatever may have been the case with regard to this, and to the existence of an old town on the Janiculum, there were here a number of small towns. The two cities could exist together, as there was a deep marsh between them.

The town on the Palatine may have been for a long time dependent on the Sabine conqueror, who, according to tradition, was Titus Tatius, and hence it is that his memory has been so hated. He was slain at the sacrifice of Laurentum. Ennius calls him a tyrant in the well-known line:

O Tite, tute, Tati, tibi tanta tyranne tulisti.

The existence of a Sabine town on the Quirinal hill is confirmed by the number of Sabine chapels which undoubtedly stood there, as Varro still knew, who proved from this fact that the Sabine ritual was received by the Romans. This Sabine element in the Roman worship has almost always been mistaken.[56]

The legend that by the rape of the virgins war had arisen between the Sabines and Romans, is without doubt a symbolical account of the relation between the two places, when as yet there was no intermarriage between them. The Sabines had the upper hand, and denied it; the Romans conquered it by force of arms. The Sabines were certainly originally the masters; but by some movement of the Romans, other Sabine places like Antemnæ and Fidenæ, were subjected, and the Sabines were thus isolated from their countrymen. The Romans again insisted upon their independence, and from thence arose war, the issue of which may have been that which is handed down to us,—only that Romulus is to be set aside,—namely, that both places formed a sort of confederacy as two closely united towns, each with a senate of a hundred men and a king, with an offensive and defensive alliance; and that in common deliberation, the assembly of their clans met on that spot between the two cities which afterwards bore the name of Comitium. Thus they formed against the foreigner only one state.

The account of a double state existed already among the ancients; yet the only proofs of it which have been preserved are scattered notices here and there, chiefly among the scholiasts. The head of Janus which in the earliest times is represented on the Roman As, is symbolical of it. Roman antiquaries have quite correctly understood this. The empty royal throne by the side of the Curule seat of Romulus refers to the time when there was one king only, and is emblematical of the equal but dormant right of the other people.[57]

It is also historical that this agreement was not of long duration; and that the Roman king usurped the rule over the Sabines; and that the two councils combined and formed one senate under one king, it being also settled that the king should by turns be a Roman and a Sabine; and that each time the king should be chosen by the other people, yet that no one should be forced upon the non-electing people whom they did not like, but that he should only be able to enter upon the imperium, if in the first place the auguries were favourable, and moreover the whole people had confirmed him. The other tribe had therefore the right of recognising or rejecting the king elect. This is told of Numa as a fact; yet it is merely a representation of the right taken from the books of rituals. This strange double act of election, which seems such a riddle, and was formerly so entirely misunderstood, is in this manner quite intelligible.

When the two states amalgamated, after having existed separately perhaps for ages, the towns ceased to be towns, and the collective mass of their clans formed itself into tribes. The nation consisted therefore of two tribes. From the earliest times the style of addressing the Roman people was, Populus Romanus Quirites, out of which, when the origin was forgotten, Populus Romanus Quiritium was made; just as lis vindiciæ afterwards was into lis vindiciarum. This change is older than Livy; yet the correct use of the phrase is still met with in his time, though much encroached upon by the false one. The old tradition says that the name Quirites had after the union of the two tribes been adopted as a common one. But this is false. The name first becomes common at a very late period only. When for a long time there had been no more difference between Romans and Sabines, nor between these and the Luceres; and even later, when that between the patricians and plebeians had become almost wholly extinct, this denomination still remained, and was transferred to the plebeians. Thus the two towns stood side by side as tribes (tribus), and it is merely in acknowledgment of the old tradition that we call the Latins Ramnes, and the Sabines Tities. That the derivation from Romulus and T. Tatius is incorrect, does not impair the truth of the main assertion.

Dionysius, who had good materials, and made use of very many of them, must indeed, for the time of the Consuls, have sometimes had more than he gives; especially concerning one important change in the constitution, where he has a few words only, and has either not seen clearly, or has been careless.[58] Yet with regard to the olden times of the kings he was clear. He says that there had been a dissension between the two tribes concerning the senates, which Numa had compromised, by not taking any thing for the Ramnes as the first tribe, but bestowing honours upon the Tities. This is perfectly plain. The senate, which at first consisted of one hundred, but now of two, was divided into ten decuries, each of which had a president. These are the decem primi, and these were taken from the Ramnes. They formed among themselves the Collegium, which, when there was no king, held the government by rotation; each for five days, yet so that the same always came back in their turn, as we must correctly assume with Livy. As for Dionysius, he brings in his Greek notions, taken from the Attic Prytanies; and Plutarch quite misunderstands the matter.

Not only the senate, but also the augurs and pontiffs, were doubled in number; so that each college consisted of four members, two of them from the Ramnes, and two from the Tities. These changes were attached indeed by Dionysius and Cicero to the names of certain kings; yet this must not hinder us from acknowledging them as quite historical.

Thus was Rome in the second stage of its development. This state of compromise is that of peace, and is described as the reign of Numa. Concerning him the traditions are simple and short. They had the ideal of a peaceful period, with a holy man at the head of affairs like Nicholas Von der Flue in Switzerland. People pictured to themselves Numa inspired by the goddess Egeria, whom he married in the grove of the Camenæ; who introduces him among the quire of her sisters, afterwards melts into tears at his death, and gives her name to a well springing from them. Such a peace of forty years, during which no people had risen against Rome, because Numa’s piety had had its influence upon the other nations, is a fine idea; but it is historically impossible at that time,—evidently a poetical fiction.

With Numa the first sæculum closes, and quite a new epoch begins; just as in Hesiod the ages succeed each other. The age of the heroes is followed by the iron era: it is evidently a period;—quite a different order of the world is supposed to be commencing. Hitherto we had mere poetical fiction; but now with Tullus Hostillus a sort of history begins, i. e. events which on the whole must be taken as historical, being foreign to history only from the light in which they appear. Thus the destruction of Alba is historical, very probably also the reception of the Albans into Rome. The conquests of Ancus Marcius are very credible: this point of real history stands like an oasis in the midst of legends. Something like this we once find in the Chronicle of Cologne. In the Abyssinian annals, there occurs in the thirteenth century one story, quite explicitly given, which we recognise as a piece of contemporary narrative. Before and after that, nothing historical is met with.

The history which now follows is like an image seen from behind, like phantasmagoria. The names of the kings are entirely fictitious. How long the Roman kings have reigned, no mortal man can know, as we do not know how many have reigned. For seven was fixed upon for the sake of the number only, which is found in connexion with many proportions, especially some important astronomical ones. The chronological dates are therefore utterly worthless. One ought to look upon the interval, from the origin of Rome to the times when people were able to execute those gigantic works which were really executed under the kings, and which vied with those of the Egyptians,—the sewers, the wall of Servius, and other buildings, as at least a succession of centuries. Romulus and Numa are to be wholly set aside; yet there follows a long period in which the races gradually amalgamate with each other, and spread, until the regal government disappears, and makes way for a republic.

For remembrance sake, we must, however, give the history as we have it. Between Rome and Alba there is not the least connexion, not even in those writers who suppose Rome to be an offshoot from Alba. Yet all at once, under Tullus Hostilius, they appear as enemies; each of the nations seeks for war, and the only question is to gain the favour of Fortune, on the strength of each party pretending to be the injured one, and wishing to declare war. Both mutually sent envoys to demand satisfaction for depredations committed. The form was, that these envoys, the Fetiales, told to every one they met the grievances of their town; then they proclaimed them in the market-place of the foreign town, and if after three times ten days no satisfaction were given, they said, “We have done enough and now return,” whereupon the senators at home deliberated about the manner of the satisfaction. In this formula, therefore, the res, the giving up of the guilty, and the restitution of the body was to be demanded. Now we are told, that the two nations at exactly the same time, sent such envoys; but that Tullus Hostilius had for a while detained the Albans sent to him, until he had learned for certain that the Romans had not had right done them at Alba, and had there declared war. He now first admitted the envoys into the senate, and to their complaints it was answered, that they themselves had not redressed the grievances of the Romans. Livy therefore thus continues: bellum in trigesimum diem dixerant. Yet the formula is post trigesimum diem; why did Livy or the annalist whom he followed, alter this? Quite naturally. One rides from Rome to Alba in a couple of hours; so that it was impossible that the Alban envoys should have been detained in Rome for thirty days, without being apprised of what was in the meanwhile going on at Alba. Livy saw this, and therefore altered the formula. But to the old poet this was of no consequence: he did not let it trouble him. He enlarged in his imagination the distance, and made Rome and Alba great states.

Just as undeniably poetical is the whole representation of the state of affairs in which Alba’s fate was decided. We shall dwell a little on this point, in order to show how a semblance of history may be got up.

There was between Rome and Alba a ditch, fossa Cluilia or Cloelia; and moreover there must have been a tradition that here the Albans had pitched their camp. In Livy and Dionysius we find it mentioned, that a general of the Albans, Cluilius, had given it this name, and had also died in that spot. The latter circumstance must have been told to account for the general being afterwards a different man, Mettius Fuffetius, and yet that it should be still possible to connect the name of that ditch with the Albans. The two states commit the issue of the feud to single combat. Dionysius says that the traditions were not unanimous, as to whether the Roman champions were called Horatii or Curiatii; yet he as well as Livy gives them the name of Horatii, in all likelihood, because the larger number of the annalists so had it. Who, without that passage of Dionysius, would have guessed any thing of that uncertainty? The combat of the three twin-born children is symbolical of both the states being at that time divided into three tribes. Attempts have indeed been made to clear away the improbability by denying the triple birth,—one of them is even mentioned as the youngest; yet the legend goes still farther, the brothers being said to have been the sons of two sisters, and to have been born on the same day. This is to represent the absolute equality between Rome and Alba. The issue was the complete subjection of Alba. Yet Alba did not remain faithful. In the struggle with the Etruscans which followed, Mettius Fuffetius shows himself a traitor to Rome; but he is prevented from executing his plan, and afterwards falls on the fugitive Etruscans; Tullus by way of punishment caused him to be torn in pieces, and Alba to be demolished; and the most distinguished Alban clans were transferred to Rome.

Equally poetical is the legend of the death of Tullus. He foolishly undertakes conjurations like Numa, and thereby draws the thunderbolt upon his own head.

If we try to make out the historical substance of these legends, we come to a period when Rome no longer stands alone, but has already colonies with Roman settlers, who possess a third of the soil, and who hold the sway. This is the case with a number of towns, most of them old Siculian ones. So much is certain, that Alba was destroyed, and that after its fall, the towns of the Prisci Latini formed an independent and compact confederacy. How Alba was destroyed is involved in great obscurity. Whether, as it is said, it was ever forced to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome; whether it was destroyed by Romans and Latins combined, or by Latins or Romans alone, are questions which no human sagacity can solve. The destruction by the Latins rising against Alba’s superiority is the most probable; but whether in that case Rome received the Albans into her bosom, will ever remain uncertain. That Alban clans were settled at Rome we cannot doubt, as little as that the Prisci Latini from henceforth existed as a consolidated state. Yet if we consider that Alba lies in the middle of the Latin country; that the Alban hill was their common sanctuary, the grove of Ferentina their place of assembly; the greater probability is this, that Rome did not destroy Alba, but that the latter perished in the insurrection of the Latin towns, and that the Romans strengthened themselves by the admission of the Albans.

Whether the Albans first built on the Cælius, is more than we can ascertain. The account which places the foundation of the town on the Cælius in the times of Romulus, tends to prove that before the reception of the Albans, a town already existed here. But what weight has that account? A third tradition represents it as an Etruscan colony of Cæles Vibenna.

The destruction of Alba had an extraordinary effect on the greatness of Rome. At all events there now existed a third town on the Cælius and part of the Esquiliæ, which seems to have been very populous. Such a settlement quite close to other towns was made for the sake of mutual protection. Between the two older towns there was a perpetual marsh and morass; the Roman town was likewise bordered on its south side by a piece of stagnant water; but between the third town and Rome there was dry ground. Rome had also a considerable suburb towards the Aventine, behind a wall and ditch, as is represented in the legend of Remus. The latter is a personification of the plebeians: he jumps from the side of the Aventine over the ditch.

The Sabine town had without doubt the name of Quirium; for the πολιτικόν of it is Quiris. This is certain. Almost as little do I doubt but that the town on the Cælius was Lucerum; because, when it was united with Rome, its citizens were called Lucertes (Luceres). The ancients derive this name from Lucumo king of the Tuscans, or from Lucerus king of Ardea. The meaning of the latter may perhaps be this, that the tribe was Tyrrheno-Latin, since Ardea was the chief town of that tribe. Thus Rome was enlarged by a third element, which is not, however, on an equal footing with the other two, but is in subjection to them, just as Ireland was to Great Britain before the year 1782. Yet although they were obliged to acknowledge this supremacy, they were already looked upon as being a part of the whole, as a third tribus with an independent administration, though with inferior rights. What here shows us our way is the statement of Festus, who on the subject of Roman antiquities is very trustworthy, inasmuch as he makes extracts from Verrius Flaccus. In a few points only has one of the two in my opinion made a mistake; all the rest may be accounted for by the deficiency of the extract, as Festus did not always understand Verrius Flaccus. The statement of Festus, which I am now speaking of, is this, that Tarquin the Proud had reduced the number of the vestals to six, so that each tribe might have two of them. In connexion with this is to be taken the passage in the tenth book of Livy, which asserts that the augurs were to represent the three tribes. The numbers in the Roman priestly colleges may always be divided either by two or by three: by three, those of the vestal virgins, of the great flamens; by two, those of the augurs, the pontiffs, the fetiales; these last represented only the two first tribes. Before the passing of the Ogulnian law, there were only four augurs; and when afterwards five plebeian ones were added, the basis of this increase was indeed a different[59] one; yet the ancient form of divisibility by three was kept up. The pontiffs, of whom there were likewise four, had at that time only four added to them. This then would seem to be an inconsistency; but a passage of Cicero on the subject has been overlooked, in which he tells us that the number of those added had been five, evidently counting the Pontifex Maximus with them, which Livy does not.—In the same manner there were twenty Fetiales, ten for each tribe; and Numa added to the Palatine Salii, another brotherhood of the same kind on the Quirinal. Every where the two first tribes are plainly opposed to each other on an equal footing, while the third is left in the background.

The third rank accordingly consisted of free citizens; yet it had not the same rights as the two first. Nevertheless it thought itself better than all other people; it stood in the same position as that in which the Venetian citizens of the mainland did to the nobili. The nobleman of Venice treated one of these citizens with more regard than he showed to any of the others, so long as he did not take upon himself to claim to have a voice in political matters. Whoever belonged to the Luceres called himself a Roman; and if the dictator of Tusculum had come to Rome, the man of the third tribe in it would have looked down upon him as an inferior, although he himself was of no account.

Tullus is succeeded by Ancus. Tullus makes his appearance as one of the Ramnes, as a descendant of Hostus Hostilius, one of the companions of Romulus; but Ancus on the contrary is a Sabine, and a grandson of Numa. His story has an historical air: there is none of the colouring of poetry in it. The development of the state advances in his reign another step. Rome and the Latin towns are, according to the old description, at war with each other, and the Romans carry it on with success. How many of the details of which we are told here, are historical, I cannot decide: that a war took place is credible enough. It is said that Ancus after this war led away many thousand Latins, and established them on the Aventine. The ancients judged differently of him: he at one time appears as captator auræ popularis, and at another he is called bonus Ancus. Like the three first kings, he is also stated to have been a lawgiver: of the later ones this is no more mentioned. He is said besides to have founded the colony of Ostia, and therefore to have extended his rule to the mouth of the Tiber.

Ancus seems, like Tullus, to be historical; only we can hardly suppose that the one was the immediate successor of the other, and that the events which are placed in their reigns really belonged to those times. These events must be considered in the following manner. When at the end of the fourth reign, the Romans, after a long feud, came to an agreement with the Latins about the renewal of the long neglected league, Rome dropped her claims to a dominion which she could not preserve, and in exchange enlarged herself on another and a safer side. The eastern colonies coalesced with the preserved Latin towns, although this is nowhere expressly stated. Part of the Latin country was yielded to Rome, the rest entered into relations of friendship, and perhaps of isopolity with it. Rome in this acted wisely, as England did when she acknowledged the United States of North America.

In this manner Rome acquired a distretto (district). The many thousand settlers whom Ancus is said to have led to the Aventine, are the population of the Latin towns which fell to Rome, a much more numerous one than that of the two old tribes, even with the addition of the third, which was already much the largest. In this rural district lay the strength of Rome; from it was the army raised with which the Romans carried on their wars. Now it would have been natural to admit this population as a fourth tribe, but this did not please the Romans: the constitution of the state was closed, and it was looked upon as a trust in which nothing must be changed. As our forefathers in their different tribes clung to their own peculiar laws (the emperor Otho made a question arising out of the law of inheritance to be decided by an appeal to the judgment of God), so was it likewise among the Greeks and Romans. A town in Sicily had Chalcidian Nomima, another had Doric ones, although the population was entirely mixed: in the former there were four; in the latter, three tribes.[60] The division into three tribes was an indigenous Latin one; but it may be that the Sabines in their towns had the division into four.

Here we have the first beginning of the plebes. Although the story that Ancus led the Latins away from their homes, and transplanted them in Rome, deserves no credit, because it is impossible; yet it is not to be doubted that Ancus Marcius is justly mentioned as the builder of a town on the Aventine. Here arose a town, which to the very latest times kept itself politically separated from Rome proper, and which for a very long period, as a byetown, was not comprehended in the Pomœrium.

Ancus is succeeded by Tarquinius Priscus, who is represented as a half Etruscan, son of an Etruscan woman and of Damaratus. The latter is said to have been a Bacchiades, who in the revolution of Cypselus had left Corinth with great treasures, and emigrated to Tarquinii. His heir was his son Lucius Tarquinius, as an elder son, Aruns, had previously died, leaving behind him a wife whom the father did not know to be with child. This account is very generally believed, because Polybius, though a Greek, mentions Tarquin as a son of Damaratus, and because the time corresponds. Yet this is after all merely an illusion. The whole agreement hinges upon the correctness of our chronological dates of the Roman kings, according to which Tarquinius Priscus ascended the throne in the year of the city 132; but if we must place him at a later time, the story of Damaratus and Cypselus, which pretty certainly belongs to the thirtieth Olympiad, falls at once to the ground. Now it has already been remarked in the general review of the sources of Roman history, that all the old annalists, with the single exception of subtle Piso, have never doubted but that Tarquin the Proud was the son of Tarquinius Priscus; and consequently the date assigned for the latter must be altogether incorrect. And therefore the connexion with Damaratus becomes impossible.

Damaratus belongs to the old tradition about the connexion between Greece and Etruria, and of the civilization which came from Greece to Etruria. As Evander did to the Latins, so does Damaratus bring the letters of Cadmus to the Etruscans, or Tyrrhenians; and he also belongs, according to the most ancient Greek tradition, to equally early times. The alleged connexion with Tarquinius Priscus arose from the circumstance that the old legend speaks of Tarquinii as the place where Damaratus settled. Of his descent as a Bacchiad, the tradition certainly knew nothing: it was added by later historizing accounts, which every where tried to keep up a sort of link with history. The reason for referring Damaratus to Tarquinii was partly this, that Tarquinii was an important town, and partly also that between Tarquinii and Corinth there is a connexion not to be mistaken. Formerly the vases and vessels found in Tuscany were taken for Etruscan; but afterwards people most justly gave up that opinion, though they now believed that such vases had never existed in ancient Etruria. But there have been vessels dug up at Corneto which are perfectly similar to the oldest Greek ones,—not to those which were formerly called Etruscan but to the real Greek ones from the earliest times, especially to the Corinthian ones which Dodwell has copied.[61] Fragments of the same kind are only found there near the old Tarquinii. In all the rest of Tuscany such a vessel has hardly been met with more than once or twice; whilst in the north-eastern part of the country, near Arezzo and Fiesole, the Arretinian vessels of baked red clay with embossed figures of quite a peculiar style of art are quite common, which, on the other hand, are nowhere found near the coast. This connexion of the art of Tarquinii with that of Greece, especially Corinth, explains the tradition that the artists Eucheir and Eugrammos had accompanied Damaratus from Corinth.

When once Tarquinius Priscus was connected with Tarquinii, and the tradition besides was remembered, that the solemn worship of the Greeks had first been introduced by him, it was said, “this is the work of the old Greeks;” and now it became necessary to compare the Roman chronology, as laid down in the books of the pontiffs, with the Greek one, which could already be done, as Timæus had written. Then it was found that the connexion became possible, if Damaratus was made the father of Tarquin. This Tarquinius Priscus or Lucumo, it was said, had with his wife Tanaquil, an Etruscan soothsayer, betaken himself to Rome, being only a half citizen at Tarquinii; and on his journey thither, a miracle happens to him. Of his reign many glorious things are told. Yet here the accounts differ: one, that of Livy, is very modest; another makes him conquer all the Etruscan towns. This is to be read at length in Dionysius; the story of it has its place in the Roman annals, so that Augustus even had these victories marked in the triumphal Fasti as three triumphs with definite dates, as we see from the fragments which remain.[62] Now the Romans had so much the more reason for believing these statements, as Tarquinius Priscus is always mentioned as the man who united the two towns, that of the Sabines, and that of the Romans, and built the gigantic works by which also the valleys were filled up.

The same account, generally calls Tarquinius Priscus Lucumo; yet this was never a name, but the Etruscan title of a prince. Whenever the Romans want to invent any thing about the Etruscans, they always call the men Lucumo, Aruns, or Lars. The last of these probably means king. Aruns is a common name, as we may see from the inscriptions of the Etruscan tombs, of which we cannot indeed understand one word, but yet may recognise the names. I have looked over all the Etruscan inscriptions, and have arrived at this conviction, that there is in them an entirely different language, of which we can only guess some words: for instance, ril avil means vixit annos. Lucumo is nowhere found on them; and the old philologians also, as Verrius Flaccus, knew that it was no name. The Romans had several traditions concerning a Lucumo who acts a part in Roman history; one, for instance, was a companion of Romulus. No one else is meant by any of them but Lucius Tarquinius Priscus; that is to say, the tradition referred every thing to him that was told of the others. Livy says that he had given himself at Rome the name of L. Tarquinius Priscus, for which the philologians reproach him as guilty of a great oversight, which, however, is only to be deemed one if we suppose that he had explained Priscus to mean “The Old.” Yet Livy might often in the first book have written down the narrative under the conviction that all that had not really so happened, and that something different might be understood as its meaning. Priscus is a common name with the Romans. Among the Patricians we find it in the family of the Servilii; Cato was called Priscus before he got the name of Cato, i. e. Catus, the prudent one, with the emphatic termination o; and besides these a whole series of families bear this cognomen. I am convinced that Tarquinius has been brought into connexion with Tarquinii only because of his name, and that on the contrary he was in reality a Latin. This is supported by the mention of Tarquinians, who after the expulsion of the kings reside at Laurentum; and likewise by the fact that Collatinus betook himself to Lavinium, a Latin town. The whole story of the descent of Tarquinius Priscus from Damaratus falls besides to the ground, as Cicero, Varro, and even Livy acknowledge the existence of a gens Tarquinia; and how utterly different is a gens indeed from a family which only consists of two houses, that of the kings and that of Collatinus? Varro says expressly, omnes Tarquinios ejecerunt, ne quam reditionis per gentilitatem spem haberet.

The reason of Tarquin’s being connected with Etruria was, besides his name, the necessity of accounting for an Etruscan influence on Rome. The Romans made Servius Tullius, who was an Etruscan, a Latin from Corniculum; and vice versa, Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, who was a Latin, an Etruscan. Thus the whole story of his descent is a fiction, and this is also decidedly the case with Tanaquil, inasmuch as the Romans so name every one of the women who were stated to have been Etruscans, it being a common Etruscan name, which is often met with in inscriptions. In the old native tradition Tarquin was married to a Latin woman, Caia Cæcilia, a name which must be traced back to Cæculus the founder of Præneste. Her image was set up in the temple of Semo Sancus; for she was worshipped as the guardian goddess of female domestic virtue. This bears a genuine stamp of nationality. In the old legend, she is such a familiar personage that the girdle of her brazen image was filed off, and the filings were used as remedies.

It is therefore a matter of history, that there was a Latin Tarquinius Priscus; yet he in all likelihood belongs to the Luceres. He introduces the Luceres into the senate; to the two hundred councillors a hundred more are added, summoned by the king as gentes minores after the gentes of the two first tribes; in the rebellion of his son against Servius Tullius, they are his faction. His time seems to be parted from the former one by a great gulf: in his reign, Rome appears under quite a different form from what she had before. The conquests which are ascribed to Ancus Marcius are confined within a very narrow space. He first conquers the mouth of the Tiber, and fortifies Ostia. But now a state of things is mentioned, the consequences of which we still see, even to this hour. To this very day there stands unchanged the great river vault, the Cloaca maxima, with the name of which one incorrectly associates a base meaning. It is not a mere sewer, though it is also used as such. Its real object was no less than that of draining the great branch of the river’s bed, which went forth from the Tiber between the Capitoline, the Aventine, and the Palatine, and between the Palatine and Capitoline, and then extended in marshes to the space between the Quirinal and the Viminal, and of thereby gaining solid ground. This work consisting of three half circles of huge blocks of free stone without mortar, which even to this present moment have not given way the breadth of the back of a knife, drew off the water from the surface, received it under ground, carried it into the Tiber, and formed a firm soil. At the same time, because the Tiber had also muddy banks, a great wall was built as a dyke, the greater part of which is still in preservation. This construction is equal in extent and bulk to the pyramids; in difficulty it very far surpasses them. It is such a gigantic fabric, that one does not comprehend it when one sees it: even the aqueducts of the Emperors are indeed nothing great when compared to it. They were of brick, with a cast of mortar in the middle; but here, all is of hewn Alban freestone, with immensely deep foundations.

Whether the Cloaca Maxima was executed by Tarquinius Priscus, or by his son Superbus, is a point in which the ancients differ from each other, and we also can decide nothing. This much, however, we may say, that the building must have been completed before the town was enclosed within the circuit of the seven hills, and formed a whole; yet this was done by the last king but one, and therefore, if we will avail ourselves of the personification, in the time of Tarquinius Priscus. But such a work could not possibly have been executed with the resources of the State as we know it to have been at that period, when its territory extended from the river about two leagues in breadth, and at most six to eight leagues in length, and consequently was not as large as that of Nuremburg; especially if we think of all the difficulties of an age in which trade and commercial wealth were in no wise in existence. Here are evidently all the intervening stages leaped over, and we see at once an Empire before us quite different from the former one, in which Rome rules far and wide. Of this sway we find no mention in Livy, although he too is astonished at these buildings. Livy fancies that time to be a state of childhood for the city, and is therefore under the same delusion by which Cicero, and the later writers especially are beguiled; that the period of the kings was to be looked upon as the age of Rome’s greatest weakness. Much more correct might be the account given by Dionysius, according to which the Etruscan towns, the Latins, and the Sabines paid homage to Tarquinius Priscus. Only all the narratives of the manner in which this had come to pass are so fabulous, that one cannot be mistaken as to their being invented by those who had wished to solve the riddle. Here history entirely fails us. But whatever relation Tarquinius Priscus may have to the Tuscan legends of the conquests of Tarchon, this much we may say; that Rome itself ruled at that time with an extensive sway, or else that it was the seat of foreign rulers, so that at all events a state of things had existed in which Rome was the centre of a foreign empire.

Another undertaking quite as enigmatical is assigned to the same reign of Tarquinius Priscus. It is said that Tarquin had wished to double the Romulean Tribus, that is to say, to add three new tribes bearing his own and his friend’s names. To this the Augur Attius Navius had objected, as three tribes were enjoined by the auspices. Probably the legend was not as Livy, but as Dionysius has it; that Tarquin had himself cut through the whet stone, and in doing so had wounded his hand. The king had not indeed then formed three new tribes, but had annexed new centuries to the old ones. In this legend therefore the immutability of the tribes is spoken of, as well as the intention of the ruler to double the community by new citizens, which scheme the old citizens set their face against, pleading the sacred character of the original number. But we see here a ruler, who is not a mere magistrate, but governs by arbitrary force:—he yields as to the form, but alters the substance, making second centuries. Centuries and tribes are originally the same thing, since the tribus had a hundred clans. How it was with the second centuries is utterly hidden from us. One hypothesis is this, that as many of the old clans had died away, Tarquin formed new ones; for instance, that when the Ramnes had dwindled to fifty, he added to fill up the number fifty new clans, as secundi Ramnes. We have the example of the Potitii, who became extinct in the time of Appius Claudius, though they still consisted, as we are told, of twelve families. The rolls of exclusive families show with what rapidity they become extinct. In Styria there were formerly two thousand noble families, and now there exist scarcely a dozen of them; in the duchy of Bremen, the equestrian body admissible to the diet dwindled within fifty years to half its number, merely because they intermarried only with those of their own cast. In Luneburg the government formerly belonged to the noble houses; now there is only one house left. Perhaps Tarquin collected the remnants of the old Curies, and then made up clans which were wanting. What recommends this supposition is this, that there remained some difference between the old and new clans. Certainly the new centuries had not the weight which they would have had as independent tribes.

It is a very uncertain thing to seek allegories in historical statements, and to try and draw from them again historical facts. Thus as Ancus Marcius is the founder of the plebes, and the murder of Tarquin is said to have been brought about by the Marcii, one might surmise that Tarquin, who was one of the Luceres and had introduced them into the senate, had perished owing to rebellion of the plebeians. Yet this is one of the most hazardous hypotheses, and therefore I did not choose to have it printed. In proffering it, I support myself on a credit to which he may lay claim, who for eighteen years has almost incessantly devoted himself to these researches, after having been fondly attached to them for many a year before.

The legend which makes Tarquin the acknowledged chief of the twelve Etruscan towns, leads us to speak of the Etruscans. They are perhaps of all the nations of antiquity that on which the most different disquisitions have been made with the smallest apparatus of authorities, and about which also the greatest number of deceptions have been circulated. The forgeries of one Annius of Viterbo, of one Inghirami, and others, are impudent in the highest degree; and yet they have nevertheless become the sources of many later works. By them Dempster, and by him Winkelmann in his turn, was led astray. In the eighteenth century, the Italians did not indeed forge any more documents; but with the greatest recklessness they gave themselves the air of being able to explain what could never be explained. Indeed, many written documents existed of the Etruscans; yet only a few great ones. Five years ago an altar was dug up, written all over on three sides; a cippus in Perugia; a coffin at Bolsena, &c.; and descriptions have been published of them, some separately, and some collectively; especially by Lanzi. On works of art also, inscriptions are found. To interpret these is a matter of great interest, since, if we could read them, much light would dawn upon us; but this has given rise to the definite presupposition that they were capable of being explained, and thus the most arbitrary things were done. Eastern languages, and the Celtic were applied to it; at last Lanzi acted on the supposition that it was a sort of Greek, and, in defiance of all the rules of grammar, he formed at his own pleasure a spurious Greek. With all these relics, we stand without knowing any thing, as we did with regard to the hieroglyphics, until Champollion arose. Long inscriptiones bilingues only could help us out. We may positively assert that the Etruscan has not the least resemblance to the Latin and Greek, nay, to any language which is known to us, as Dionysius already has justly observed. This passage of Dionysius has purposely been overlooked, or its absolute meaning has been wrested into a conditional one. The Umbrian on the Eugubian tablets, has some resemblance to the Latin.

Dionysius had this information, that the Etruscans considered themselves as an indigenous people, which descended from no other, and, knowing nothing of the name of Tyrrhenians and Etruscans, called themselves Rasena.[63] Of the traditions of the Greeks they knew nothing. Yet the latter had two distinct traditions concerning the Tyrrhenians, which they referred to the Etruscans; the one, that of Hellanicus, that the Pelasgians from Thessaly had settled at the mouth of the Po, at Spina, from whence they had crossed over the mountains to Etruria; the second, that of Herodotus, according to which the Lydians at the time of Atys, were visited by a famine, so that part of the people under Tyrrhenus were obliged to emigrate to Italy. Dionysius controverts the latter statement in that good style of criticism which we sometimes find in him, on the ground that neither the language nor the religion of the Etruscans bore any resemblance to those of the Lydians; and that neither the Etruscans, nor the Lydian writer Xanthus,—whose work, as O. Müller shows, was unjustly suspected among the Greeks of not being genuine,—know any thing about it. Dionysius in this judged rightly, because he did not work from books, but from immediate observation. With the other tradition he deals differently: he does not altogether drop it; but he refers it, not to the Etruscans, but to the aborigines. The Italian antiquaries, on the contrary, stuck to the Lydian tradition; or they also referred the emigration of the Pelasgians from Thessaly to the Etruscans, and said, in spite of all the assertions of Herodotus, that the inhabitants of Cortona (Croton) were not at all different from the people of the neighbourhood. And here I will now set forth the simple results of my researches concerning the Etruscans. I have (in the new edition of the first volume of my Roman history) shown that the name of Tyrrhenians was transferred by the Greeks to the Etruscans, as we use that of Britons when speaking of the English, or that of Mexicans and Peruvians, of the Spaniards in America; because those nations dwelt originally in these countries, whilst a newly immigrating people founded quite a new order of things, and that so completely that we no more recognise any traces of an earlier condition, than if the former had never existed. The Tyrrhenians were quite a different people; yet they inhabited the shores of Etruria, as well as the whole coast to the south, as far as Œnotria proper, i. e. Calabria and Basilicata. These Tyrrhenians were Pelasgians, as well as those of the Peloponnesus and Thessaly: and when Sophocles speaks of Τυῤῥηνοὶ πελασγοί in Argos; when in Æschylus king Pelasgus, son of Palæchthon, rules in Argos; when Tyrrhenians, according to Thucydides, reside near Athos, and in Lemnos, and, according to Herodotus, in Attica near the Hymettus, these are all branches of one and the same stock. In Asia Minor we must fill up the gap in history after the destruction of Troy by making the Lydians, Carians, and Mysians, push forward from the interior country nearer to the coast in the neighbourhood of the fallen city, partly subjugating, partly expelling, the Meonians and other Pelasgian nations. The Meonians, who are always distinguished from the Lydians, are likewise Tyrrhenians, and are called so by Ovid in the Bacchian fable. Now these Tyrrhenians have given to the coast of Western Italy and to the Tyrrhenian Sea their names: the Romans call them Tusci. Both names passed to the Rasena, who came down the Alps as conquerors. Thus the whole statement of Herodotus becomes clear. It is a usual genealogical explanation to show how Tyrrhenians could have been in Lydia, and also in Italy. This opinion is now generally received in Germany and in England.

The only difficulty, which indeed does not damage the evidence for this representation, but is surprising as a fact, is this, that after the Etruscan conquest of the Tyrrhenian country, the language of the Rasena is the only one preserved on so many monuments; and that no trace of inscriptions is to be seen in the tongue which was akin to the Greek, as we must presume the Tyrrhenian to have been. But, in the first place, these inscriptions were almost all of them found in the interior of the country near Perugia, Volterra, Arrezzo, &c., where the original population was Umbrian; and on the sea coast near Pisa, Populonia, Cære, Tarquinii, and elsewhere, only in very small numbers. Some have been lately discovered near Tarquinii, but they have not yet been published: one might therefore say, that if no Tyrrhenian inscriptions have yet been met with, they may still be found. But no stress is to be laid on such special pleading. In conquests which bring a heavy yoke upon the conquered, the language of the vanquished often becomes wholly extinct. In Asia and many other countries, the use of the native tongue was forbidden, in order to prevent treason. The Moors were in many respects mild rulers in Spain, and the country flourished under their sway; yet in Andalusia, at the advance of the Christians, a king forbade his people on pain of death to speak Latin, so that a hundred years afterwards no more trace of that language is to be found. As late as in the eighteenth century, the whole Christian population of Cæsarea spoke Greek: a bashaw forbid them to do so, and after a lapse of thirty or forty years, when my father came to the place, not a soul was any more able to converse in that language. In Sicily, at the time of the Norman conquest, the language was exclusively Greek and Arabic; even under the Emperor Frederic the Second, the laws were still promulgated in Greek; afterwards this language all at once utterly disappears. In the Terra di Lecce, and the Terra di Otranto also, the names were afterwards Italian, but conversation was in Greek; and at the end of two hundred years, in the fifteenth century, it became extinct also here. In Pomerania and Mecklenburg, without any immigration of Germans, merely owing to the predilection of the princes, the Vandal language has vanished in the course of one or two generations. The conquerors of the march of Brandenburg forbade the use of the Vandal tongue on pain of death, and nothing soon was spoken but the Low German, (plattdeutsch). The Etruscans had quite an aristocratical constitution, and they lived in their towns in the midst of a large subjected country; under such circumstances, it could not but be of great importance to them, that the people should adopt their language.

The Rasena came down from the Alps as conquerors, since, according to Livy and Strabo, not only the Rhætians, but also the other Alpine tribes, the Camunians, the Lepontians on the Lake of Como, were of Etruscan race. That they were forced by the Gallic conquest to retire from the plain into the Alps, has never been said by any of the ancients; and it is absurd to think that a people which fled before the Gauls from the Patavinian plain, should have been able to subdue the mountaineers of the Alps, or have been allowed to have any footing there, unless those regions had already before been occupied by others of the same tribe. We have the tradition, probably from Cato, that the Etruscans had taken three hundred Umbrian towns;—these must be considered as belonging to the interior of Tuscany;—and a long time afterwards, a district in Tuscany is called Umbria, and a river, Umbro. The Etruscans are therefore one of those northern nations which were driven to the south by the pressure of some of those national migrations which are quite as historically certain as the later ones, although we do not find any record of them,—national migrations like that which had driven the Illyrians forward, so that the Illyrian Enchelians, about the fortieth Olympiad, burst into Greece, and sacked Delphi, as Herodotus tells us. Such a national migration drove the Etruscans from the north. They once inhabited Switzerland and the Tyrol; nay, it surely happened to the Etruscans in those countries, as it did also to the Celts in Spain, that some tribes kept their ground longer than the other. The heathen wall on the Ottilienberg in Alsace, which Schweighäuser has described as one of the most remarkable and unaccountable of monuments, is evidently an Etruscan work: it has exactly the character of Etruscan fortification, as we see it at Volterra, Cortona, and Fiesole. Some would have this called the Gallic style of building; yet quite groundlessly, as we may see both from Cæsar’s description, and also from other remains and structures in Gaul. There are two essentially distinct kinds of fortifications in central Italy. The one are the so-called Cyclopian Walls, built in polygons, which alternate with intentional irregularity along the slope of a hill, in such a manner that it has become quite scarped, but at the summit it is without walls. The ascent is by a ledge on the slope of the hill, Clivus, which one may ride up on horseback; at the bottom of it, and at the top there are gates. In this manner the Roman and Latin hills were fortified. The other are the Etruscan fortifications, which are erected on the crown of a hill of difficult access, the wall being not of polygons, but of parallelopipeds of colossal dimensions, very rarely of hewn stone, which follow the ridge of the hill in all its bendings. Thus it is near Volterra, and such is the one in Alsace just spoken of. Now, I do not assign the origin of this wall to such very ancient times, but to a kindred tribe with the Etruscans, which had long maintained its ground there against the Celts; and yet I would not quote its existence as an irrefragable proof that there had been such a tribe. The Etruscans settled first in twelve towns in Lombardy; about as far as to the present Austrian frontier, on the side of Piedmont (Pavia was not Etruscan); in the south, from Parma to Bologna; in the north, from the Po to Verona; then they spread farther, and founded or enlarged in the country south of the Apennines twelve towns besides, from which they commanded the country. Now it is the common belief that the Etruscans were quite an ancient people in Italy; I was myself for a long time of that opinion. But very old in Tuscany they are not; and in that part of southern Tuscany which now belongs to the States of the Church, they have spread only very late. Herodotus relates that about the year of the city 220, the unfortunate Phocæans had been beaten in a sea-fight by the Agyllæans who dwelt in Corsica, and the Carthaginians, and that those who had been taken prisoners were stoned to death; that the vengeance of heaven for this crime had been made manifest; that the Agyllæans had applied to Delphi, and that Apollo had imposed upon them Greek sacrifices and the worship of Greek heroes. Now Agylla, according to the unanimous account of all writers, bore this name as long as it was Pelasgian: thenceforth it was called Cære by the Etruscans. Mezentius, the tyrant of Cære in the legend which Virgil with his great learning embodies in his poem, may with much probability be taken to be the Etruscan conqueror of Cære. He also appears afterwards as the conqueror of Latium, who claims for himself the tithe of the wine, and even the whole produce of the vintage. The extensions of the Etruscan sway belong to the age of the last kings of Rome: they are connected with the expedition of the Etruscans against Cuma, and in the country of the Volscians. About the time from Olympiad 60 to 70, they spread in those parts; in the year of the city 283, they found Capua, according to Cato’s account, which has certainly great authenticity. The shortness of the period allowed for the growth and decay of the people, the objection started by Velleius, cannot make this improbable: Capua, for instance, had already been built two hundred and fifty years before it became a large town: New York is a case yet more in point. The time, therefore, when Hiero of Syracuse defeated the Etruscans near Cuma, was that in which these people flourished. In the beginning of the fourth century of the city, they declined, while the Romans rose; and in the middle of the century, the Gauls wrested from them the northern part of their territory,—their possessions in the neighbourhood of the Po.

After men had come to the conviction that the Alban origin of Rome was untenable, Rome was believed to be an Etruscan colony. I myself put forth this supposition, and made it the groundwork of the first edition of my History, because I held the Alban Latin descent to be false. This Etruscan origin seemed to me to be confirmed by several circumstances, especially by the statement of a certain Volnius in Varro, that the names of the oldest Roman tribes were Tuscan; and, moreover, by the remark that the secret theology of the Romans was derived from Etruria, and that the sons of the ten first in the Roman senate learned the ordinances of religion there, insomuch that the worship of Jupiter, of Juno, and of Minerva on the Capitol, was in all likelihood after the Etruscan ritual. Yet by unprejudiced researches I have convinced myself that this is not the case; that the two original elements of the Roman state are the Latins and Sabines, though I would not altogether dispute the existence of an Etruscan one afterwards added to it; that as Rome is much older than the spread of the Etruscans in those parts, the statement of Volnius is either groundless, or the names of the tribes were later than the tribes themselves; yet that the strong influence of the Etruscans at the time which is designated as the reign of Tarquinius Priscus, and of Servius Tullius, is sufficient to account for all the Etruscan institutions in Rome. Moreover no ancient author ever speaks of an Etruscan colony at Rome. The question then is only this, Whether the Etruscans spread so early, that in the times of Tarquinius Priscus they were already in possession of Tarquinii and the neighbouring places? or whether they began only about the sixtieth Olympiad, and later, to appear on the Tiber and beyond it?

Before we now proceed to set forth the changes which manifested themselves in those times, a picture must be drawn of the oldest constitution of Rome previous to them, after we have first told the history of the Etruscans, as far as we have any knowledge of it.

What we know of the history of Cuma is very obscure: the foundation of no Greek town in those parts is dated so early. This would not have been the case if Cuma had not so soon ceased to be a Greek town, and had come into the power of the Oscans before the time when the people in those districts began to write Greek. All towns in fact have surely had eras dating from their foundation; and by this means it became possible to get definite chronological dates, which were afterwards reduced to Olympiads. For it was only at a very late period that the Greeks reckoned by Olympiads. The first who does so is Timæus (Ol. 120 to 130): Theophrastus does not yet use this computation. But when a town like Cuma happened to have been lost to the Greeks, there was then no trace of this era, and consequently nothing on which one could lay hold but the genealogies of its Ctistæ (Founders). If therefore it was stated, that this man or that man had founded a city, people made out his descent as far back as Troy and the heroic age. Thence it comes that Cuma was looked upon as so wonderfully old, as two hundred years older than the neighbouring Greek towns; for the real era of this city was lost at an early period, and it was surely not older than the other Greek towns. What was known of Cuma probably existed in Neapolitan Chronicles, which Dionysius also made use of. His description of the war of the Etruscans against Cuma is indeed mythical: the Volturnus flows back to its source, &c. yet this is only a matter of secondary consideration. Herodotus is also mythical; for instance, at the destruction of the Carthaginian army against Gelon,—yet for all that the war which he relates is not to be doubted of. The people of Cuma were then at the height of their prosperity, and possessed Campania. If therefore the Etruscans besieged Cuma about the sixty-fourth Olympiad, this shows clearly that they were at that time conquerors, which is in perfect agreement with Cato’s account, that Capua had stood only two hundred and sixty years since its foundation; that is to say, it was an Etruscan colony. Thus therefore, with regard to the passage of the Etruscans over the Tiber, we have the date 250 to 280 according to our usual chronology from the building of Rome; and as late as 220 to 230, Herodotus represents Agylla as a town which consults the oracle at Delphi. That this had been done by Etruscans, who thought so much of their own religion, is inconceivable; and the more so, as there existed a deep-rooted hatred between the Etruscans and the Greeks, owing to which it was that the Romans received the command to sacrifice a Gaul and a Gallic woman, and also a Greek and a Greek woman,[64] from the Libri Fatales, which were of Etruscan origin; and not from the Sybilline books, as Plutarch would have us believe. This national hatred already displays itself every where: in Pindar, in the Bacchian fable, it is transferred to the Tyrrhenians, but it is to be understood of the Etruscans. The Etruscans therefore also reach the Tiber at a much later time than is generally supposed; they spread forth by degrees, attain to their meridian height, maintain themselves in it for two generations, and then fall into rapidly increasing decline. Of the earlier Etruscan history, we positively know nothing. We find in Tuscany twelve cities altogether independent of each other, but yet sometimes joined together in a common undertaking. It was customary that a king reigned in each of these towns; still no trace is found in any Italian people of an hereditary rule, as among the Greeks. Moreover these cities are not united in any artificial confederation: a league is formed of itself from their assembling at times at the temple of Voltumna for the purpose of common deliberation; and besides this they had a common priest for the whole nation. It seems, however, true, for, as the Etruscan language was unintelligible to the Romans, we must be very cautious in using their traditions,—that in common enterprises one of the kings was chosen, whose supremacy the other towns acknowledged, and whom they invested with the royal insignia. Yet it would seem that this pre-eminence was not always the result of an election, but that a city often usurped the leadership; as in the war of Porsena, Clusium is the chief town of the Etruscans. The accounts which we have represent Rome as being in the same relation to those towns: the twelve cities are stated to have sent to Tarquinius Priscus the ivory throne and the insignia; according to others, to Servius Tullius. Neither of the two accounts is historical; but this is a sign, that Rome under the last kings was the capital of a mighty empire, much greater than during the first 160 years of the republic, of which also we still have proofs in Rome itself. With regard to Etruria in particular, Rome seems to have been acknowledged as a chief town; yet this is only something transient, which perhaps under the kings already was changed several times.

The Etruscans have all the distinguishing features of an immigrating people, probably not much more numerous than the Germans who settled in Italy at the beginning of the middle ages. The towns bear rule, and in them the clans govern; their territories are large, but have no importance. This oligarchical form of government was the very thing which made Etruria powerless against Rome, as it was dangerous to put arms into the hands of the common people.

Dionysius, who gives the expressions of his authorities with great care, says that the magnates of the Etruscans had assembled with their clients for war. Among the Romans it is only the last resource to call upon the clients, when the plebeians refused to take the field. Other nations also allude to the fact that Etruria was peopled by vassals under a territorial aristocracy. When on the advance of the Gauls the dwellers on the left bank of the Tiber separated from Rome, Rome drew to herself those on the right bank, Cære got isopolity; four new tribes were formed from those who in the war had separated from Veii and Falerii, evidently not transfugæ, as Livy says, but whole populations which joined Rome to escape from oppression. This plainly appears from analogy; for from the Volscians two tribes only are formed, and as many from the Sabines. Moreover, the history of the insurrection of Vulsinii exhibits the condition of a vanquished people, as I have shown in the first volume of my Roman history. The Vulsinians formed from their serfs a plebes in order to repel the Romans; the plebes afterwards subjects its former rulers, and the latter choose rather to throw themselves into the arms of the Romans, and to allow their town to be destroyed by them. There is every where such an oligarchy; hence it is that we find so very few towns in Etruria. The whole country from the Apennines to Rome had only twelve. For this reason power was only in its rudest state of development: there was no lasting vitality in it, no elements of national existence, as among the Romans, or the Samnites who evidently did not oppress the old Oscan people, but combined into one whole with them, and even adopted their language; whilst on the contrary, the Lucinians, who had emigrated from among the Sabines, stood in quite a different position to the old Œnotrians, or else the numbers of their citizens must have been stated quite differently by Polybius. Here an opposite policy bears opposite fruits. The insurrection of the Bruttians is nothing else but that the Œnotrians, who were already serfs under the Greeks, broke their chains when they became subject to new masters who treated them still more harshly. The Etruscans, in spite of their wealth and their greatness, could not withstand the Romans; their towns did not form a closely connected state as did those [of] the Latins, nor even as the Achæans. Most of the towns laid down their arms in the fifth century, after one or two battles. The only town which defended itself for thirty years, was that very Vulsinii where the serfs were changed into a plebes. The Samnites resisted for seventy years; the Lucanians for a very short time only.

The Etruscans have met with great favour with the moderns; the ancients thought very lightly of them. Among the Greeks, very unfavourable accounts were in circulation concerning their unbounded luxury. In some measure justice is done to them in respect to the fine arts. The technical perfection and quaint effect of their works had great attraction; the Signa Tuscana were about as much prized at Rome, as old German pictures are now a-days in Germany.

The Etruscans enjoyed particular consideration as a people of priests, who were devoted to soothsaying in all its forms, especially from meteorological or astronomical phenomena, and from the entrails of victims: the augural divinations, on the other hand, are an inheritance of the Sabellian races. Yet we must after all acknowledge this to have been a system of gross fraud. I will not deny that the observations on lightning led the Etruscans to interesting discoveries. They were already aware of the lightnings flashing forth from the earth, which are now generally acknowledged by natural philosophers, but were denied only thirty years ago. That they knew of lightning conductors, as one might suppose from Jupiter Elicius, is now much less probable to me than it was formerly. It would never have been so entirely lost. And, besides, it is not stated that the lightnings were attracted, but called forth.

In history, the Etruscans show themselves in any thing but a favourable light. Unwarlike, inclined to withdraw from impending danger at the price of humiliation; just as in modern times so many states have done between 1796 and 1813. The descriptions of their great luxury may have been exaggerated; yet they had some foundation. For nearly two hundred years, the Etruscans lived in the most profound peace under the Roman dominion, free from every service in war; except in extraordinary emergencies, as in the war of Hannibal. To this period, then, the immense wealth and luxury which Polybius described are to be referred.

The Etruscans had also annals, of which the emperor Claudius made use. Some few portions of them may have likewise come to Verrius Flaccus and to Varro. Cæles Vibenna is especially celebrated. He offers, in fact, the only historical point which we know from the history of the Etruscans. Cæles Vibenna is said by some to have come to Rome, and to have settled on the Cælius. According to others, and indeed to those who follow the Etruscan traditions, he died in Etruria, and his general, Mastarna, led the remainder of his army to Rome, where he is said to have given the Mons Cælius the name of his old general. In the narratives we always find him as a condottiere, as the independent leader of a free corps, in no sort of subjection to any of the towns; like the Catalan hosts in the beginning of the fourteenth century, and the East Indians in the eighteenth. We do not know any thing more about him; yet the emperor Claudius asserts, from the Etruscan books, that his faithful general, Mastarna, when he had come to Rome and settled on the Cælius, had been received into the Roman state under the name of Servius Tullius. This is possible; whilst, on the other hand, the tradition of the Romans concerning Servius Tullius falls entirely within the sphere of the miraculous. It is said that in the ashes of the altar a vision of the God of fire had appeared to Tanaquil; that she had ordered her maid to lock herself up there, dressed as a bride; that the maid had gotten with child, and had borne Servius Tullius; and that therefore, in token of the latter’s descent from the god of fire, his head had during his childhood been surrounded, when he was asleep, by a halo of fire, and also at the conflagration of a temple, his wooden image in it had remained untouched. With a great deal of circumspection those who refine on history, have attempted to introduce this legend also into authentic history. Many of them find his descent from a bondmaid to be unseemly; and so they make him out to be the son of a man of rank at Corniculum, who had died, and had left her with child, whereupon she had been brought to the royal palace. According to others, his mother was indeed a bondmaid, but his father was the king. The halo of fire also is interpreted as symbolical of his early developed mind: non latuit scintilla ingenii in puero, says Cicero. Yet the old poets meant it seriously. We have the choice either of leaving the descent of Tullius in obscurity, or of believing that the Etruscan histories are true. I am so decidedly of opinion, that the Etruscan literature is older than that of the Romans, that I do not hesitate to give their legends the preference; and still more so, because Tarquinius Priscus has been made to be an Etruscan; since the existence of an Etruscan element was perceived, which, on account of the name, was referred to Tarquinius. Servius Tullius was represented as belonging to another race, chiefly because Rome did not wish to own herself indebted to an Etruscan for the important changes which are ascribed to that king. As he could not, however, be positively assigned to any distinct clan, recourse was had to the mythus; and he was made to be the son of a god like Romulus, just as Numa also was said to be the husband of a goddess. In the case of the son of a god, it is of no consequence who is his mother.[65] Yet we cannot draw from this any farther conclusions; nor can we make any use in history of the notice that he was an Etruscan, and that he led the remainder of the army of Cæles Vibenna up to Rome. Livy speaks of a Veientian war; but he only gives a few outlines, from which it is evident that he knew this was nothing but the fraudulent work of the Fasti.

In the legend we find Servius Tullius as a Latin, who ascends the throne, yet not even by regular election. To him all the political law is traced back, as all the spiritual was to Numa; a proof that to Livy himself they were no historical persons. The gens Tullia, to which Servius may have belonged, perhaps by adoption, is expressly mentioned as an Alban clan settled on the Cælius, consequently belonging to the Luceres; and thus a king of the third tribe,—or as that and the commonalty are very nearly related, for it is derived from Corniculum,—a king from the commonalty ascends the throne. He is installed in his rule without election; yet he is then acknowledged by the Curies. Now Servius appears important from three different points of view:—as the enlarger of the city, inasmuch as he gave to Rome its legal circuit, even as it remained down to the time of the Emperors, although suburbs were added;—as the author of a constitution, since he constitutes the plebes as the second half of the nation;—and as the founder of the connexion with the Latins, who before that had only been either at war with the Romans, or else in a state of forced dependance upon them.

In these respects he is of such consequence, that we must dwell at some length on the subject. Tarquinius Priscus and Servius Tullius, for the sake of clearness, shall here be treated as if they were historical persons; but merely for the designation of relations and causes, their names serving instead of an x. In this manner, as was already remarked, we start from the most ancient form of Rome previous to this change.

In its first form, Rome consisted of a city on the Palatine, surrounded by a wall and ditch, with a suburb, and of a Sabine town on the Quirinal and on the Tarpeian Hill. From the union of both, Rome arose; and from the union of both bodies of citizens, the Roman citizenship. All modern states, with the single exception of the canton of Schwytz, have their governments and subdivisions according to their territory. Every city is divided into districts and wards, and on these, in representative governments, the representation is based: he who has his abode in a district is both an elector, and may also be elected in it. But the view which the ancients took was this, that the land was only the substratum of the state; that the state itself was formed of individuals; and that the relations of these to the whole community were modified in different ways by the corporations. Hence the state was divided into a certain number of associations, each of which again consisted of several families. These associations had among themselves their assemblies, their rights of inheritance, &c. their tribunals, and especially their sanctuaries. Whoever belonged to them, bequeathed these to his children; and wherever he might live, within or without the state, he was always deemed to belong to that association. Whoever, on the contrary, did not belong to it by right of birth, could only come in as an exception, if that association acknowledged him. A man might be received into the state with all the rights which the ancients confined to the citizen as such, he might acquire landed property, he might sue and be sued; and yet, unless he had a share in some association, he was only an inmate, and could not be invested with an office, nor could he vote. This view was generally entertained by all the most ancient states. The state could merely bestow upon an individual the right of abode and civil privileges: it could not command the association to receive any one. In many states, the associations had not even the right of admitting any body. This is the case with the castes which always remain exclusive, and which, being separate, allow of no intermarriage. Such an association, comprehending a number of families from which one may go out, but into which one either cannot enter at all, or only by the adoption of the whole association, is a clan, and by no means what we call family, which implies an origin from a common root; for when these clans have patronymics, they are always merely symbolical, and derived from heroes.[66] I assume it as a certain fact that among the Romans the division of the nation was into gentes, which were analogous to the γένη of the Greeks, and to the Geschlechter of our German forefathers. This is a presupposition to start from, for which, when the time comes, historical proofs will not be wanting. Let us first speak of that people concerning which the accounts are more distinct,—the Greeks. Their γένη are associations which, notwithstanding their common name, are not to be looked upon as families sprung from the same ancestors; but as the descendants of those persons, who at the foundation of the state were united in a corporation of this kind. This is expressly stated in Pollux, undoubtedly from Aristotle, wherein it is asserted that the Gennetæ were called from the γένη; and that they were connected not by descent (γένει μὲν οὐ προσήκοντες) but by ἱερά which they had in common. Then we have also the evidence of Harpocration concerning the Homerides in Chios; he says that they were a genos in that island, but that according to the opinion of the well-informed they had no relationship whatever with Homer. These γένη are just like the Arabian tribes, the Beni Tai are ten thousand families who cannot all descend from Edid Tai; or like the clans of the Highlanders, who were named after individuals; yet it was only in a poetical sense that they spoke of themselves as the kinsmen and descendants of these. In the Highlands there were five thousand Campbells able to bear arms, who looked upon the Duke of Argyle as their cousin.

Concerning the Roman gentes we have no positive evidence, like that of Pollux and Harpocration (such perhaps as Verrius Flaccus would have given), that they were corporations without relationship; but we have an important definition of Cicero’s in the Topica. He there gives the word gentiles as a difficult subject for definition; and such it was, because in fact time in its course had wrought a thorough change in the original institution. The gentes in Cicero’s days had lost much of their former consequence, and their constitution had been affected by law decisions. He says, Gentiles sunt, qui inter se, eodem nomine sunt. Non satis est. Qui ab ingenuis oriundi sunt. Ne id quidem satis est. Quorum majorum nemo servitutem servivit. Abest etiam nunc. Qui capite non sunt deminuti. Hoc fortasse satis est. According to this, the Scipios and Sulla were gentiles; for they are eodem nomine, &c. Suppose that one of the Cornelii had been addictus as liable to a debt, or condemned to death for a crime, then he was capite deminutus, and ousted from his tribe, exactly what the English in feudal language call “corruption of blood.” And should he now as an addictus beget children, these also were outcasts, and did not belong to the gens. By the added clause quorum majorum nemo servitutem servivit, all the Libertini and their descendants were excluded, although bearing the gentile name of their patrons; yet all the Peregrini were left, whom one might admit if one chose. But this in all likelihood is an addition which was unknown to the old gentile law. For, in my opinion, there was in the earlier times no difference whatever with regard to the Libertini: they belonged to the gens as well as the patrons. Yet this was a moot point, as is shown by the remarkable lawsuit between the patrician and plebeian Claudii (the Marcelli), for the inheritance of a Libertinus in Cicero de Oratore. On that occasion a res judicata was pronounced by the centuries, that the patrician Claudii could not inherit in a case of this kind; from which the conclusion was afterwards drawn that the Libertini did not belong to the gens.

In the whole of this definition, there is not a word about a descent from a common stock, closely connected as the idea would seem with it. Hence it clearly follows that the gentes in Rome were of the same nature as the Greek γένη. Genus and gens are moreover quite the same word, a thing which often happens with words of the old language, e. g. cliens and clientus,[67] Campans[68] and Campanus, and likewise Romans and Romanus: the genitives Romanum and Romanom come from that old contracted nominative.

The very institution of the gens essentially implies a division of the state by its fundamental laws into a certain number of such associations, which then constituted small states by themselves, and enjoyed special privileges of which the extent was very great: jus gentium, and jura gentium, originally had perhaps a somewhat different, a much wider meaning than we generally believe. The numbers of the gentes are always found in such a proportion to the state as never could have been the result of chance. In Attica there were 360 γένη, a number which the grammarians very correctly refer to the division of the year, or of the compass. This is also the case in Germany; in Cologne there were three orders, each of fifteen houses (Geschlechter); in Florence there were three times four and twenty houses; in Dittmarsch three times ten. Now in Rome there were probably three times one hundred gentes, i. e. three tribes of a hundred clans each; wherefore Livy gives them the name of centuria, and not tribus. There usually existed between the division into tribes and that into clans an intermediate one comprising the latter, as the φράτραι: in Greece, the curies at Rome, which corresponded to the orders in Cologne, and to the classes in the Lombard towns. These Curies are parts of a Tribus, and a combination of several gentes (probably consisting always of ten) for common sacrifice. And just as every gens had its own gentilician sanctuaries,—for sacra familiarum, which sometimes we find mentioned in modern writers, were unknown to the Romans,—so likewise as member of a Cury, each individual had some special duties besides of worship, and a vote in the popular assemblies. The ancients did not vote by poll, but by corporations: from the earliest times therefore it continued to be the established usage at Athens that recruiting and voting should be carried on by φυλαί (Tribus). Four Phylæ might be outvoted by six; although, if polled, the latter were very inferior in numbers. In Rome they went still farther: they did not vote by Tribes but by Curies. The reason for it is easy to be seen: for, since at first the Ramnes and the Tities were ruling alone, difficulties might have arisen from allowing only these two to vote. It might easily have happened that one tribe would be for, and the other against; and this would have led to collisions. But if each Tribe was again divided into Curies, and voted accordingly, it was then perhaps more likely that some one Cury gave the casting vote. Before the admission of the third estate this would necessarily happen. Afterwards we find that the turn of the Curies and the prærogativa were decided by lot, a thing which cannot be presumed to have been done before; for by this means the Luceres might have got the initiative as well as the two others. But here we have an instance of the innumerable stages by which the Roman constitution developed itself; and it is precisely this gradual development which has given such a long duration to Roman freedom. For the true secret of a great statesman, who is quite as seldom found as any other great genius, is indeed the gradual perfection and reform of the several points of an existing constitution, and not the sudden setting up of a finished work.

Thus therefore the Curies came into the place of the tribes. During the reign of Tarquinius, the third estate was admitted to the full citizenship: these are the gentes minores. The gentes are such an essential element of the constitution, that, as gentes civium patriciæ is the formal expression for patricii, thus also gentes civium majores and minores is said. It is stated that the senate had consisted of two hundred, and that Tarquinius had raised it to three hundred by the admission of the gentes minores. This can only mean that he gave the third tribe the full citizenship, and received a number of them, which corresponded to that of their gentes, into the senate; and this is the usual course of things. In Cologne also, the second and third order were admitted to offices later than the first. It is a great change in the constitution, and one which completes it for the first populus. The third estate at the beginning was not quite on the same footing with the rest: their senate was not consulted until the other two had already voted, and in the same way their Curies were certainly only allowed to vote when the others had already given theirs. With regard to the priestly offices, they were only admitted to the college of the Vestals. Where we find duumviri, these are but the representatives of the two first tribes: it is in later times only that we find triumviri, and when these are patrician, they represent the three tribes. But they are likewise often plebeian, and then based upon the plebeian constitution to be treated of hereafter.

One of the widest spread peculiarities of former times, is the difference made between the old homebred citizens and those who have come from without. This difference has been almost every where done away with by the notions of the eighteenth century. In North America there is hardly any homebred population: with the exception of the eligibility for the presidentship, it matters not in the least how long one has lived in the country; there is no difference between him who is come from the first colonists, and the man who has just landed. Among the ancients, the admission to the rights of citizenship was every where difficult: the alien needed not to be of a foreign tongue, he might belong to the same nation as the citizen, and even to the same tribe of the nation. The lines of demarcation are drawn in the most varied manner. In the oldest constitution of which we have any authentic knowledge, that of the Jews, we already find such a distinction. The people consists of tribes with unequal rights, just as the tribes of the Romans; besides these, are the persons who had been received into the congregation of the Lord. With regard to the latter, the Pentateuch expressly makes this distinction, that some nations might be received, and others not. These aliens form a mass closely connected with the Jewish people, but out of the tribes. In after times, when the Jewish constitution is better known to us from books of more recent date, the population is divided into Jews and Proselytes; and the latter again into two classes,—the Proselytes of Righteousness, and the Proselytes of the Gate.[69] The former had political and civil rights, yet they were excluded from civic honours; they could buy land, make wills, marry Jewish women, &c. &c. The Proselytes of the Gate had to accommodate themselves to the Jewish customs; they could not do any thing which was against the ceremonial law for fear of giving offence; but they did not participate in civil rights with the inhabitants of the country.

The same system presents itself, only less distinctly, in all the Greek constitutions,—a fact about which so much nonsense has been talked. Among the Greeks there existed from the very earliest times, besides the sovereign body of the citizens, a community of native freemen, who had civil rights, but by no means in every instance the privilege of intermarriage with the ruling tribe; they might sue and be sued, yet they had no share in the government. It was otherwise with the aliens or the freedmen, who were bereft of all the personal rights of citizens, and only protected against violence by taking a citizen for their patron. This twofold distinction, that one might be born in a country and exercise civil rights to a certain extent; and that those who were aliens had no civil rights whatever, was a very general notion.

The body of the Roman citizens was now enlarged. At its first origin it was an aristocracy, only so far as the subjected people of the neighbourhood and the freedmen stood in the position of vassals to the citizens; beyond this, no aristocratical relation whatever existed. But when Sabine and Latin communities were so incorporated with Rome that they got full civil rights, and had to serve, that class was formed which in our German towns we call Pfahlbürger (burghers of the pale), an expression which no one has rightly and clearly understood. The derivation of this word is from Pahl, or Pfahl, (pale); in Ireland, the counties round Dublin were said to be “within the English pale.” This name was also given in Germany to the district in the immediate vicinity of a town. The freemen who lived in it had, properly speaking, no rights of citizenship, as these were limited to the Geschlechter (the Houses), but merely civil rights. The signification of the word in the course of time was more and more widened, it being also applied to those aliens who had acquired the right of community with a country (Landrecht), or a town (Burgrecht), the isopolity of the Greeks. The investigation of this subject, which is perfectly analogous to the origin of the Roman plebes, has to me been fraught with such considerable difficulties, because in the sixteenth century these relations had vanished, and we therefore nowhere find any thing more about them. In the fifteenth century this expression is still found, but hardly in the sixteenth. Johannes Von Müller did not understand it, and has used it without any proper meaning. Now, when a province, or a town, or a baron established such a right of community (Landrecht or Burgrecht) with a town, the consequences of it were twofold. In the first place, both parties protected each other in their feuds; and moreover, the strangers might settle with their vassals in the town, where they had the full civil rights of freemen, and also their own courts of law: yet they were not of the sovereign people, as they had no share in the government; and in this respect the Houses, as having the sovereignty, stood on quite a different footing. Many of the communities beyond the Tiber, Sabine and Latin, entered into relations of this kind with the Romans, and it was chiefly on the Aventine that they settled. The account given by the Roman historians is, that Ancus had led them from their homes, and had made them take up their abode there; but there are circumstances which make this impossible. For, since all the land near Rome was occupied, they could not have got any there, and must therefore have had their dwellings some miles away from their fields. It is very possible that some of the most distinguished were obliged to settle in Rome. This citizenship “of the pale” now became more and more enlarged. The great body of the people did not as yet form a corporation, though they contained all the elements of one: they increased in the city and the environs at such a rate, especially owing to the union with Latium in the reign of Servius Tullius, that they far outnumbered the old population, and formed the chief strength of Rome, and were employed to a great extent in the wars. And the more they grew, the more did the Tribes, which only intermarried among themselves, die off.

Thus arose the Roman Plebes,—the Greek δῆμος, in German Gemeinde. The demos comprehended all those who had the inferior citizenship, and who therefore owed service to the state, but had no rights but that of personal freedom. Thus the δῆμος stands in contraposition to the πολῖται, the plebes to the populus, the Gemeinde to the Bürgerschaft, the commune to the cittadine.[70] I also think that πόλις was not originally the term for city (which was called ἄστυ), but just like populus, a Tyrrhenian word; and that both of these bear the same meaning which we have stated above, Populus having been formed by reduplication from πόλις. The commonalty is in all states the main part as far as numbers are concerned; yet the way in which it developed itself was different in the ancient world from what it was in the middle ages. In the middle ages, the commonalty resided within the walls: it often settled, as for instance in Geneva, round the cité, the heart of the town, in the bourg, borgo, the suburbs; and its members were therefore called bourgeois. These suburbs were then likewise fortified, and in the course of time gained equal rights with the cities. In Germany the same thing happened, the name only being different, for Bürger and Geschlechter have the same meaning; and there the cities sprang up, particularly after the tenth century, when the age had become more settled. And in Gaul, where a civitas and a royal villa still existed from the times of the Romans, a place often grew up near the villa, which remained under the protection of the king, and under the management of the mayors of the Palace. This is the original meaning of the word ville, as opposed to cité. There is therefore a distinction in French towns between la cité, la ville, and le bourg. Wherever the commonalty was growing up within the walls, it was formed of quite different elements. In the Germanic states, aliens were better treated on the whole than they were in the ancient world, or even in France. The Beisassen of the small Swiss cantons, as for instance of Uri, are, properly speaking, nothing else but subjugated communities; the inhabitants of St. Gervais were subjects of Geneva. In France, by the droit d’aubaine, the liege lord was heir to the aliens who were not naturalized; for they were not allowed to make a will. In all those medieval towns where trade and commerce were paramount, the commonalty soon divided itself into guilds, which got their own heads and wardens, their own privileges and style, as well as property; as to capital jurisdiction, it could only be granted by the kings, and wherever it was exercised, they had a share in it. The wardens of the companies at first appear in the council to take care that their rights were not infringed upon; but they soon took their seats as members, and ended by getting the ascendency. This is clearly seen in the Italian cities, e. g. in the case of the seven old guilds at Florence. During the feuds of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines, the clans or houses had still the upperhand; but soon afterwards, about the time of Rudolf of Habsburg, the guilds are every where the ruling power,—in Italy in the thirteenth century, and in Germany about the middle of the fourteenth; at Zurich as well as at Augsburgh, at Strasburg, Ulm, Heilbronn, and the Suabian imperial cities. The transition is made by the houses (Geschlechter) sharing the government with the guilds: wherever this is conceded, the union is effected peacefully; but where it is refused, it is only after a sanguinary struggle, which generally ends in the destruction of the houses. But sometimes also the reverse takes place, as at Nuremberg, where the guilds were crushed.

This union of the clans and of the community, or the guilds, is called in Greece πολιτεία; in Italian popolo, the meaning of which is somewhat different from that of the Roman populus.[71] The partition was so fully carried out, that at Florence, for example at the palazzo vecchio, and on books also, the coat of arms of the city, a fleur de luce, and that of the commonalty (il commune), a cross, gules, field argent, are seen side by side. The expression il commune easily gives rise to misconceptions; it does not mean the union, but the commonalty, as Savigny has pointed out to me. At Bologna there is a palatium civium, and a palatium communis. The Capitano del popolo and the Capitano di parte at Florence are also difficult to be understood. In the struggle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines, the Capitano di parte, that is, of the party of the Guelphs, having driven the Ghibellines out of the city, was placed at the head of affairs, and the others had their rights of citizenship suspended. The single Capitano of the houses was nevertheless called di parte. But among the ancients it was not the guilds within the walls which formed the commonalty; but the population of the country round the city, which consisted of quite different elements, comprehending people of the highest as well as of the lowest ranks. The notion, therefore, is altogether a wrong one, that the Plebes was made up of the poorer classes only. It was occasioned already by the language employed in Plato and Aristotle, as they had only the word δῆμος to designate city-corporation, commonalty, the union of both,—in short, all that did not belong to the ruling class, and moreover the common people. Dionysius knew the word δῆμος only as contradistinguished to βουλὴ, ὄχλος being the proper term for the mass of poor. Yet he also is not free from that mistake, but carried it into Roman history; and as he went much more fully into detail with regard to these relations than Livy did, he led the restorers of ancient history into quite erroneous notions. Livy likewise did not see the matter in a clear light; yet he has many passages from which it is manifest, that the annalists whom he followed were correct in their views. A further cause of this confusion is, however, to be found in the pecuniary embarrassments and debts which are stated to have prevailed among the Plebes; but which, as we shall see hereafter, are only to be understood of the mortgages which encumbered the landowners in many communities. The Plebes is the counterpart of the Populus, as the Romans in general divide all the primary agencies in nature and in the world of intellect into two; one part being male, and the other female: as for instance, Vulcanus and Vesta are the element of fire; Janus and Jana the heavenly lights, the sun and moon; the generating power of the earth, Saturnus and Ops; the earth as solid ground, Tellumo and Tellus; and thus also the entire state, Populus and Plebes, both of which together formed its whole.

Under the protection of the Populus, a number of dependents[72] (cluentes, from cluere to hear) dwelt within the liberties of the old town, which extended for about one German mile (nearly five English) on the road leading to Alba. The boundary may be laid down very accurately: unfortunately, the thought struck me only after my departure from Italy. The way in which these clients came to be bound to their patrons, just as the vassals were to their liege-lords, to ransom them from captivity, to pay the portion of their daughters, to be their stay and defence in the time of trouble, had its origin from very different causes. They may partly have been old native Siculians, who on being conquered by the Cascans, swore fealty in order to be mercifully dealt with; foreigners may also have come in as residents, and placed themselves under the guardianship of a Roman citizen; there may likewise have been among them some of the inhabitants of those places which were obliged to submit to the supremacy of Rome; and the slave who had gained his freedom, stood to his late master in the relation of a client. This class must necessarily have gone on increasing so long as Rome was in a flourishing state. The asylum, in the old tradition, has reference to the clientship, the clients having really gathered together from all quarters. Quite distinct from them, however, were the free communities, from which the country population arose, of which the first beginning was traced back to the times of Ancus. Scaliger, in one of the noblest of divinations, has discovered that Catullus calls the Romans gens Romulique Ancique, in which Romulus represents the clans, Ancus the commonalty. This plebes now increased, partly owing to the enlargement of the territory, and partly also, without doubt, in consequence of the extinction of some of the clans; in which case their former clients having no more liege lord, now joined themselves to the commonalty; and many came in besides from the free cities with which there were relations of isopolity. Such organizations are, however, imperfect in their beginnings, and are only developed in the course of time. Towns like those of the Tellenians, Ficanians, Politorians, were surely quite isolated at first, and had no regularly organized power. It is beyond a doubt, that in all the towns of Italy a Populus and a Plebes existed; and this was also the case in the Greek colonies of Lower Italy and Sicily, which in their constitutions exhibit the closest analogy to the states of Italy. In the former even the same names were certainly in use.

Before the age of Servius Tullius the country district was not yet united with the state, to which it was linked perhaps by the king alone: it does not even seem to have had commercium, that is to say, no patrician could acquire property in it, and vice versa. In many countries also, the rule was in force, down to the latest times, that the landed property of the peasant could not pass to the nobleman; a most judicious custom, which, however, was set aside owing to the illusion that it was a vain limitation. Still less can any intermarriage be presumed to have existed between the patricians and plebeians. The children of such a marriage were not admitted to the rank of their (patrician) father; but they rather followed the worse blood, that is to say, theirs was under any circumstances the inferior right. The Lex Mensia[73] has not devised this; but merely revived the rule, and more clearly defined it in difficult cases. A lawgiver now came forth, who on one hand gave to the commonalty a constitution complete in itself, and, on the other invented forms by which it was united to the whole body. The former part of this plan has been entirely overlooked, and the latter appeared to Livy and Dionysius quite a riddle; so much had circumstances changed since Fabius, who had still a perfectly correct insight into these matters. In Rome a great revolution in literature had been brought about by Cicero; and Livy must have felt himself as much a stranger among the authors of the earlier times as we do with regard to those who were before Lessing: few only were still acquainted with books. And there was likewise a great deal in the federal citizenship of the Latins abrogated by the Lex Julia, on account of which the remembrance of the former state of things has perished. Thus it is easy to understand, how it was that the judicious Livy and the learned Dionysius were quite mistaken as to these points, and nevertheless have preserved a great number of hints from ancient sources, from which we may with much trouble guess the truth. To take an example from our own times, I really believe that there are not now ten people at Cologne, who know what the constitution of their city was two hundred years ago. How many are there, who still know any thing about the constitution of their own town before the French revolution?

The division of such a country population was local. This was not peculiar to Rome, we find it also to have been the case in Greece: Clisthenes took the ager Atticus as the basis for the division of the Athenian people. The whole was divided into certain definite parts, to effect which they did not reckon together several large places, but they chose a particular number which seemed suitable, for instance, one hundred, into which the division was to be made; and for this purpose some large places were to be parcelled into districts, and other smaller ones to be combined. These divisions according to a number fixed before hand, were so general among the Romans, that, when Augustus divided the city into fourteen regions, he did not count how many Vici there were, but to each region he assigned a certain number of Vici. Now the lawgiver whom we call Servius Tullius took all those portions of the city of Rome which were inhabited by burghers of the pale, and the country around, and divided the former into four and the latter into twenty-six regions. This must be assumed as true: the proof that this statement of Fabius is correct would lead us too far. Every Populus presupposes almost as its necessary counterpart a Plebes; in a certain sense therefore there was already a Plebes before the reign of Ancus, although an insignificant one. Roma, Quirium, Lucerum had each of them their commonalty; these and the settlement on the Esquiliæ in the time of Servius Tullius constituted the four first tribes, the first of which, the Palatina, corresponds to the Palatine; the second, the Collina, to the Quirinal; the third, the Suburana, to the Cælius with the Carinæ and Subura; the fourth, the Esquilina to the Esquiline and Viminal. This organization is to be dated before the Murus Servii, as is proved to a certainty by the existence of the Esquilina. Each of these regions had a corresponding local tribe, so that all those who, at the time of their being established, were living in a place, were inscribed there on the register of the local tribes, and their descendants after them.[74] This continued so during the first generation; but in the course of time it was changed, as the descendants did not always remain in the same place. The names of the country tribes were not taken originally from the districts, but from heroes, being at the same time surnames for the tribes and for the clans; for it was evidently the object of this legislation to amalgamate the different elements of the people. The remembrance of olden times, when those places had been independent, was to be absorbed in the idea that they were Roman. They acquired common sacra like the tribes composed of clans, as Dionysius expressly mentions. Sacred rites were always among the ancients a bond of union. That the plebeian tribes had sacra, we know from the fact that Tarquin the Proud positively forbade them. Besides this, there was a local subdivision into vici for the city, and into pagi for the country. Each of these vici had a warden (magister); each tribe, a tribune. The same system was established at Athens. If for instance a person was registered at Acharnæ, and emigrated to Sunium, he still remained an Ἀχαρνεύς. As in the earlier times these tribes were all equal, there was no occasion for any one to wish to be registered in another tribe; but afterwards it was different, when there arose between the tribes an inequality of political consideration, of which I shall afterwards speak. The tribus urbanæ were inferior to the rusticæ, and the removal from the latter to the former was a nota ignominiæ: this dates from the censorship of Fabius Maximus. If a man became a Roman citizen sine suffragio, he was not received into a plebeian tribe; nor could he get admission therein by isopolity or emancipation; and therefore he could not hold any office, nor have a vote. A vote in the plebeian tribes belonged only to those who were settled on the land, and to the cultivators of the soil; he who got his livelihood by some other trade was debarred from it.

Now that the lawgiver had constituted the two bodies, the patricians and the plebeians, he might, as is done in modern states, have put them side by side in two separate assemblies. Yet this was impracticable in those earliest times, inasmuch as they both looked upon each other as enemies. In order to effect an accommodation, Servius established the centuries (centuriæ), similar to the concilio grande in Venice, in which every one was equal to his neighbour on entering the Hall, whether he were rich or poor, each being in a plain garb. It was the object of the centuries, to unite the patricians and the plebeians, and those who grew up at the side of the plebeians, and now took the place which these formerly held; and at the same time to exclude those, who, as they had no property at all, could give no guarantee to the state. The centuries therefore contained the whole of the first estate; of the second, those who were qualified to vote; of the third, all those, who, owing to their means, were equals of the second; and, besides, some distinguished trades. Great confusion with regard to this was created in Roman history by the views of Livy and Dionysius, who imagined the tribes to have differed as to rank and fortune only. They thought that the old body of the citizens, which contained the patricians, had been divided into curies, and that these were all placed on the same footing; but that this had been an oppressive democracy which Servius Tullius had done away with by establishing the centuries. This mistake is the same as that into which Sismondi falls when he represents the Italian cities, at the time in which they first appear in history, as having been democratically governed,—a prodigious error! Had the Roman historians attentively studied the old law books, they could not possibly have remained in darkness with regard to these things. It is true, however, that it is not yet fifty years since Möser’s first researches, by the light of which we too have only begun to get a clear insight into our own institutions.

According to the old system, the clansmen not only served on horseback, as in aftertimes, but likewise on foot: it was also just the same originally in the German cities. They had not at first the least likeness to a nobility. We may take it for granted that each clan served in war with one horseman and ten foot soldiers; and hence the statement in Plutarch, that the first town had consisted of about one thousand households. This looks like history; yet such additions as “about,” and others of the same kind, in Plutarch, Dionysius, and other writers of the later times, are touches put in to subdue the tone of colouring which seemed to them too bright. The narrative is quite ancient, but it is not so much history as the personification of a system of rights. In the earliest Rome there were a hundred clans, and consequently a thousand foot soldiers, each of whom was deemed to have been furnished by one house.[75] Besides these the country population had to serve, being probably called out according to their place of abode. The new laws made a change in the phalanx; relieved the old citizens from the duty of serving as foot soldiers; and granted them immunities for serving as horsemen. In laying the burthen of the foot-service on the plebeians, they also at the same time gave them corresponding privileges, and thereby the means of upholding their freedom. In this manner they divided the population into horsemen and footmen, without however excluding the commonalty from the cavalry. The military array of all the European nations in ancient times was analogous to the Greek phalanx. It was a mass of men which acted by the pressure of its own weight, and these were armed with pikes and charged with them against each other in files eight, ten, or twelve deep. The barbarians never fought in dense masses, and the Asiatics were merely archers. When the soldiers, as at Rome, stood ten files deep, those who were in the rear were not, of course, quite so much exposed and in need of so much armour as those in front: they wanted, if they closed their shields properly, no breast-plates, nor did the hindmost ranks even require greaves. Part of them also were light troops, slingers who threw either leaden bullets or stones. Every one at Rome who served on foot, had to find his equipments at his own expense, and therefore according to his means; so that the wealthier citizens were completely armed, while those who were badly off were called upon to serve as slingers only. When wars became protracted, gaps occurred in the ranks, as the first rows grew thinner; in this case, the men who were behind took possession of the arms and equipments of the slain, and being now already trained, stepped into their places. At the same time there followed a reserve in case of need. These therefore were the three component parts of the Roman line of battle,—the legion proper, the light armed, and last of all the men in the reserve, who stepped into the hindmost ranks when those in front had been filled up from thence.

Servius therefore looked upon the whole nation, Populus and Plebes, as an army, exercitus vocatus. And as this militia had to march against the enemy abroad, there was need besides of carpenters for building bridges, pitching tents, &c., and of musicians;—the former constituted one, the latter two centuries;—and now only was the host (Classis)[76] quite organized. These centuries did not consist of plebeians, as no plebeian was allowed to carry on any other trade but that of agriculture; otherwise he renounced his caste and was struck off by the censors from his tribe (capitis deminutio,) originally without any disgrace being attached to it. Yet the Romans had from the earliest times companies of trade, which were traced back as high as Numa, and of which there were three times three,—pipers, goldsmiths, carpenters, dyers, girdlers, tanners, braziers, potters, and then all the rest. Of this the intention certainly was to give the craftsmen of the city also an existence as a corporation, just as in the middle ages. But as those who were in these centuries were generally freedmen and foreigners, it became an object of ambition to get out of them, and to be enrolled among the tribes; and so the companies could never thrive. They were of greater importance at Corinth. By the division into centuries, the lawgiver connected the plebeians with the patricians and ærarians. To the trades so necessary for warfare as the carpenters and musicians, distinct centuries were assigned, by which they acquired the same rights which would have belonged to them, if they had served in war as plebeians. The carpenters were reckoned in the first class on account of their importance, the musicians in the fifth.

Lastly, he had regard to those free people who did not belong to the commonalty. Many of these certainly entered the service, either by conscription or as volunteers; for I cannot imagine that the capite censi, and the proletarii, should not have had to do any service at all. They were not, however, arrayed against the enemy; but they were camp followers, (lixæ et calones). We have no reason to presume that these had always been slaves.

Thus was an army now completely formed; and by this, together with the horsemen, Servius caused the people to be represented. For the cavalry he chose the three old double tribes, or six centuries of Tarquinius Priscus; then twelve other centuries of the Plebes, which were the most distinguished among the commonalty. In the six centuries was the entire patrician body; which indeed had on the whole a very insignificant number of votes, but, as we shall see by and by, the upperhand in other respects. Within these, there was perfect equality; there was no distinction of age: every century had a vote.

In the plebeian body, Servius Tullius selected from among those of higher rank and greater wealth, two classes,—that of the former Latin nobility, and that in which the rest were placed. To this noble class he assigned the twelve other equestrian centuries, and that without regard to property, with the exception perhaps of such persons as were quite impoverished, a fact which must be particularly urged; for according to the received opinion, they were deemed to have been the richest. Had the knights at that time already been the richest, that is to say, if we are to look upon them as having been in the same state as after the war with Hannibal, what a senseless constitution would then have been the result! All fortunes, between a million sesterces (the sum which at the end of the second Punic war was the qualification of this class) and 100,000, would not have been classified in any way; and yet lower than that again in a great number of divisions. And we have also the explicit testimony of Polybius, that the property standard was of new introduction with regard to the knights, contrary to the old system, in which birth was the qualification. Another proof, besides, is the statement that, even as the censors registered a burgher of the pale in the plebeian tribes, so did they likewise place a plebeian in the equestrian body as a mark of distinction; which excludes a classification according to property. In the reign of Augustus it was indeed quite a different case. At that time, the most distinguished men could not become knights without a certain amount of fortune.

Yet what is meant by census? With us every description of property would be valued, all rights which might be reckoned as a capital. It was otherwise with the Romans. It is to be considered as a proved fact, that the census affected realized property only, “res corporales,” that is to say, substantial objects; not res incorporales, as for instance, debts and obligations. Thus, if I have 50,000 asses in land, and owe 10,000 to some one else, I in fact possess only 40,000. Yet this was not at all regarded in the census of the ancients, as no notice was taken of incumbrances. This very point, which is of paramount importance, has never once been noticed by the earlier writers on Roman history, because they were no men of business. One must not look upon the census as a property tax, but as a land tax; or as a consolidation of direct taxes. Certain objects were estimated at a certain value, according to prescribed rules, and then one paid a corresponding assessment on the thousand. In Dutch Friesland the landed estates were rated according to pounds, and a certain tax assessed on these pounds. An estate was hence called Pondemate (Pound-mead), and a certain number of pence were paid on it. Thus the Roman census comprehended all the landed estates, and without doubt all res mancipî as well; but I am quite convinced that nothing was assessed on outstanding debts, however rich an individual might have been from these sources. The Attic census on the other hand was really a property tax. From thence it followed that the whole floating property in the state had very little weight; for the richest monied man might have come off without any tax, whilst the land had all the burthens, but likewise all the privileges. In this the census closely corresponds to our direct taxes, in which also no account is taken of the mortgages with which an estate is encumbered.

All who did not belong to the equestrian centuries were again divided into those who possessed upwards of 12,500 asses, and the poorer ones, whose census did not reach that sum. The former were distributed into five classes: in these there were no patricians whatever, but all the plebeians whose census amounted to the sum fixed, and the ærarii, that is to say, those who were not in the tribes, but had an income which made them equal to those who were. The ærarians are now what the plebeians had been before: as soon as they acquire landed property, they enter into the tribes. In the first class were all those who in landed estates, metals, agricultural implements, beasts of draught, slaves, flocks, herds, and horses, possessed as much property as was valued at 100,000 asses and upwards: these were divided into eighty centuries. All who were above sixteen and under forty-five, were reckoned among the juniores; from forty-five to sixty, among the seniores. In Sparta, the obligation to military service lasted until the sixtieth year; at Rome, it was in the case of the seniores limited to the defence of the walls only. As regards numerical proportion, the seniores certainly were not half of the whole:—men of that age, according to what is a favourable average of life in the south, would be scarcely a fourth part, or more exactly two-sevenths;—all who were alive above forty-six, might have been about the half. There is every probability that in those times all the rights and obligations of citizenship ceased at the sixtieth year. In Greece, a greater value was placed on the capacity of old people; among the Melians, the whole government was placed in the hands of the aged men above sixty. Although the seniores amounted indeed to not more than about half the number of the juniores, yet they had quite as many votes, and may also have been called up first to give their suffrages. The remainder were divided into four classes, of 75,000, 50,000, 25,000, and 12,500 asses. Of these, the second, third, and fourth had twenty centuries each; the fifth had thirty. A hundred thousand asses was no great fortune; it was pretty nearly equivalent to ten thousand drachmas of Athens, an as being worth about a stiver and a half.[77] At the levies, each century had to serve according to a fixed rate; so that those which contained but a small number, had to do more military duty than the larger ones. The conscription was from tribes and centuries combined. In the thirty tribes, one man was always called from each century of the juniores, from each century therefore thirty men. Each following class had to furnish more troops; and that in such a manner, that when the first supplied a single contingent, the second and third were to send double ones, and the fourth again only a single one, employed as a javelin corps. The fifth also served with a double contingent.

The object of the constitution, which was based upon property, would have been quite defeated, if the first class had not possessed a preponderance of votes. The centuries in the lower classes were strong in numbers in an inverse ratio to their fortunes: out of thirty-five citizens who were able to vote, six only belonged to the first class. Dionysius does not see his way through all the details; yet he plainly states that it was according to property that the whole of the calculations were made.

All those who had property, the assessed value of which amounted to less than 12,500 asses, were moreover divided into such as still belonged to the locupletes, which was the case if their rateable property was worth more than fifteen hundred asses; and into those who had even less. The latter were called proletarii, which means persons who paid no tax: they formed a century. The locupletes comprehended all the plebeians but the proletarians, and so far they were all equal; yet there was a gulf between them and the proletarians. Any locuples, for instance, could in a court of law become personal security for another; the proletarian could not. With money, of course, he only could be vindex, who was able to prove from the censor’s books that he had the requisite property; and certainly locupletes alone could be appointed as judges by the prætor, and appear as witnesses, which is shown by the term locupletes testes. The proletarians, therefore, were placed in quite a different category. Whether at that time they may not also have been debarred from voting in the plebeian tribes, is uncertain.

This is the system of centuries as established by Servius, with regard to which Livy materially differs from Dionysius, and both of them from Cicero in the second book de Republica. This passage is very ill written, but it may be amended. There result from it 195 centuries: 170 in the five classes; two of the locupletes, or assidui; the accensi and velati; two of the proletarians (the proletarii in the stricter acceptation of the word), and the capite censi; and the three centuries of the trades; and lastly, eighteen equestrian centuries, consisting of the six patrician and twelve plebeian ones. Several conjectures have been made concerning that passage of Cicero’s, all of which are wrong; as for instance, what Hermann, highly-distinguished scholar as he is, has said about it. Yet if one is familiar with these researches, every thing may be made clear by the Roman combinations of numbers, as I have elucidated them. It was the aim and object of the whole system, that the minority should decide:[78] wealth and birth combined were to turn the scale, and that by means of the eighteen equestrian centuries and the eighty of the first class, which were the earliest called up to vote; if these were unanimous, every question was decided by them, as they formed the majority of the centuries, though far inferior in number to the rest of the citizens. Among those who were equal in rank, it was again the minority which decided; for the centuries of the seniores contained so much fewer voters than those of the juniores.

Had the intention of this institution been that which historians assign to it, it would have been highly unjust to the patricians, who still continued to form a considerable part of the nation. Those who gave the account did not see that the latter belonged in no way to the classes,—their presence in the centuries was merely that they might be represented, and therefore important as symbolical only;—and they contented themselves with saying that they probably voted with the rich, consequently with the first class. Rich, however, the patricians were not by any means, according to the census: they were tenants in capite, not freeholders. But that injustice did not exist at all; for the centuries stood in the same relation to the curies as the House of Commons does to the House of Lords. No election was valid which the curies had not approved of; nor any law either, for this is the meaning of the expression, ut patres auctores fierent. Besides this, the centuries could not deliberate on any subject which had not been laid before them by the Senate; and no one from among them could get up and speak, which the curies were perfectly at liberty to do. In the tribes it seems to have been allowed, after the tribunes had made a motion, to discuss it until it was put to the vote; yet this perhaps was a privilege but seldom used. Thus therefore was the commonalty extremely restricted in the system of the centuries: it was merely a step towards a free commonwealth. The assembly of the tribes at that time had no legislative power of any kind: it had merely to elect its officers, to make rates for common purposes, and perhaps there was likewise already a sort of poor law administration, as bread was distributed under the superintendence of the ædiles at the temple of Ceres. But the most important privilege of the tribes was this, that a right of appeal to them, such as the patricians had long had to the curies, was also granted by Servius Tullius to the plebeians, against sentences of chastisement for refractory conduct towards the authorities.

The laws of Servius Tullius may have contained much more besides, but Tarquin the Proud is said to have entirely destroyed them; that is to say, they were not to be found in the jus Papirianum. There are stated to have been fifty laws. How far the equalization of both orders may have been carried in other respects, is uncertain; the exclusive claim of the patricians to the use of the public land, and the practice of pledging the person for debt, are said to have been done away with. More certain it is that the lawgiver meant also to lay down the royal dignity, and to bring in the consulship in its stead, so that Populus and Plebes should each be represented by a consul; which was only accomplished a hundred and fifty years later by the lex Licinia. He considered himself as a νομοθέτης, like Lycurgus and Solon. The transition was easy, as indeed the kings likewise were only elective magistrates for life; a system which in earlier times seems to have been very common among the Italian people. The election of two consuls seems to have been projected in the commentaries of Servius Tullius (duo consules creati sunt ex commentariis Servii Tullii; Liv.) But it was not carried into effect; be it that he lost his life too soon, or that he himself put it off. Tanaquil, in the legend, is said to have adjured him not to resign the throne, nor abandon her and hers. All that is ascribed to king Servius Tullius, was not entirely accomplished by him: it became the exciting cause of the revolution of Tarquin the Proud. Although a reign of forty-four years is assigned to Servius, Livy knows of one war only, that against the people of Cære and Tarquinii, which was ended in a few weeks. Dionysius also does not give a single detail which has even the semblance of truth. The length of his reign has been prolonged beyond all bounds; whereas there is every likelihood that it was but a short one.

To the same lawgiver the settlement of the relations with the Latins is attributed. It is said that he made a league with them, and induced them to erect a common Sacrum on the Aventine, in which the tablets containing the covenant were set up; that Rome had offered sacrifice there, and that this, as Livy tells us, was a Confessio rem Romanam esse superiorem. The inquiry into the condition of the Latin people, is decidedly one of the most difficult of that class of subjects: at first every thing belonging to it seemed to me to be confused, and it was only step by step that I came to have clear views with regard to it. It is a mistake of the ancients which I have shared with them until very lately, that Servius had acquired the hegemony over the Latins. This was first done by Tarquin: the very same authors who represent it to be the work of Servius, themselves tell it afterwards of Tarquin. The establishment of the festival of the feriæ Latinæ on the Alban Mount was from the earliest times ascribed to Tarquinius Priscus or Superbus; more correct, however, is the opinion of others, and also of some of the ancients, that it originated with the Latini Prisci. If here the chief of the Latins offered the sacrifice, and the Romans merely took part in it; it is natural, that in order to adjust the balance between the two nations, a counterpoise was formed on the other side, in which Rome got the precedence, and the Latins were guests only. This was accordingly done in the temple of Diana on the Aventine. At a later period, the Latins, having become independent, transfer this symbol of a national right to a grove before the gates of Aricia. In earlier times, Alba was the sovereign state; afterwards, the Romans and Albans are bound in friendly alliance as two distinct nations; under Servius, they join in a close confederation and communion of sacrifice. Thus leagued were the Romans, not only with the Latins, but also with the Sabines; and they constituted a great state, of which Rome was the centre. Without doubt part of Etruria was also subjected to them. This we consider to have been the work of Servius, a hypothesis which is recommended by its simplicity and which rids us of the contradiction above mentioned. When the plebeians became citizens, the Latins drew nigher to the Romans, and mounted in fact upon that step which the plebeians had just left. Thus we find in Roman history, as long as there are signs of life in the people, a steady advance of the more recent institutions, as the old ones, upon which they grew, fell into decay. Those who at first were mere allies, are afterwards incorporated, and form plebeian tribes. Thus the whole of the Roman constitution is a sound healthy development, in which nothing stagnates: the Roman people ever revives and springs up anew; and—what Montesquieu looks upon as the only true progress in the life of states,—Rome, until the fifth century, is the only state which always fell back upon its first principles, so that its life became ever more noble and more vigorous. Afterwards, people begin to check and to keep down what is fresh rising up, and then life is thrown back, and the seeds of decay are first sown. Signs of this evil already show themselves a hundred years before the Gracchi; it breaks out in their time, and from thence goes on increasing for forty years, until it gives birth to the Social War, and that of Sylla and Marius, out of which the people comes forth as a confused mass, being no more able to subsist in republican unity, and necessarily wanting an absolute authority to guide them. One might exactly tell how Rome could have become young again, and have kept up for some hundreds of years longer. The good path lay open; but people were blinded by selfish and besotted prejudice, and they tried when too late to follow it.

With regard to the gradual increase of the city there exist very contradictory opinions, which in the common topographies, as for instance that of Nardini, cause the most confused chaos. Yet this may be set to rights. It should be born in mind that the views which have influenced these statements are manifold. The statement of one set is that a hill was built upon under such or such a king; of another, that it had been taken into the town; and of a third, that those who dwelt on it had obtained the freedom of the city. The result of my researches is as follows. Old Rome was situated on the Palatine: the Pomœrium of Romulus mentioned in Tacitus, which ran from the Forum Boarium through the Circus as far as to the Septizonium, S. Gregorio, the arch of Constantine, the Thermæ of Titus, and from thence back through the Via Sacra by the temples of Venus and Roma,—even the whole of this circuit is a suburb built around the old city, and surrounded, not by walls, but by a rampart and ditch. At that time there was on the Quirinal and the Tarpeian rocks the Sabine town, which likewise had its Pomœrium: between the two ramparts and ditches a road ran along,—the Via Sacra. On this stood the Janus Quirini, a gateway which was bifrons, turned on one side towards the Roman and on the other towards the Sabine town; closed in times of peace, because it was not then wished that there should be any intercourse between the two cities; open in war, as both towns were in a league, and bound to give support to each other. A case quite analogous to this is to be found in the Gætulian town of Ghadames beyond Tripoli: the place is inhabited by two hostile tribes, and is divided by a wall into two parts, which are connected by a gate; likewise closed in peace, and open during war.[79] As for the Cælius, some say that Romulus; others, that Tullus Hostilius; others, that Ancus Marcius added it to the city. The key to which is this; that under Ancus the hill, already inhabited before, was connected with the town by a ditch, the fossa Quiritium, from the old moat of the Pomœrium to the Porta Capena, which was the first enlargement of Rome; and that this was partly to drain off the water, and partly for defence. There is too much water there for excavations to be easily made, otherwise the finest antiquities might be found in the Circus: the Obelisk was brought to light from thence in the sixteenth century. The Agua Marrana is not the aqua damnata of Agrippa: in the old Circus there was a canal which carried the water off. Here was the septem viarum vicus where Ancus cut the ditch, perhaps as far as the sewers. Moreover the Roman and the Sabine towns were still separated by the Forum, which was a marsh. The whole neighbourhood of the Velabrum was as yet a river or a lake; and before this was drained, a topical union of the two towns was impossible: the Janus, probably a dyke, was the only road. To effect this, the works were now executed which are ascribed to Tarquinius Priscus, the immense sewers, or more properly, river tunnels, consisting of one main and several minor channels. The main sewer (cloaca maxima) of a most ancient style of architecture, may be seen to this day, and still carries off the water. Its width is 18 palms,[80] and it is formed by three stone vaults of peperino (a volcanic stone from Gabii and Alba), one above the other, built in the shape of a semicircle. These form the gigantic work: the stones, each of which is 7½ palms long, and 4⅙ palms broad, are joined by no cement or dovetailing, nor any thing of the kind; they hold together merely from the way in which they fit, and the exact closing of the arch. The structure has not for two thousand years undergone the slightest change, having stood unshaken the shock of earthquakes, which have laid waste the rest of the city, and overthrown obelisks; so that one might say that it will see the end of the world. This is the work which made it possible to form Rome into a whole of that extent which it afterwards had. The entire embankment of the river, the quay, is likewise built of stone, of the volcanic stone from Alba; and we may recognise there also the same style of architecture. The other vaults begin between the Quirinal and the Viminal, and run beneath the Forum Augustum, the Forum Romanum and the Forum Boarium into the Velabrum and the cloaca maxima. They are of equally perfect preservation; but they lie deep under ground. They were found during the papacy of Benedict XIV. They are executed on the same immense scale; but they are built of travertino, from which it is manifest, that they are of a later age, and yet perhaps of the time of the republic, somewhat about the first half of the fifth century, before the war of Hannibal. Now therefore the whole country as far as the river was inhabitable, even beyond the Capitoline hill. Soon, however, were greater plans devised for the enlargement of the city. On the north side of the Esquiline, where the kings had built a rampart, level space was to be secured which had the advantage of not being able to be flooded,—a high and dry plain, whither the country people might take refuge in case of war. For this reason Servius Tullius constructed his great rampart from the Porta Collina to the Esquiline gate,—almost the fifth of a German mile, and a moat besides, an hundred feet broad and thirty deep. The earth from the moat formed the rampart, which was protected by a lining wall on the side of the ditch, and by battlements and towers on the top. Of this stupendous work, which Pliny justly regards with wonder, there is hardly anything whatever left; its line only may yet be traced. But in the times of Augustus, even in those of Pliny, it was in perfect preservation, and therefore it was not possible to talk at random about it. It was a public promenade of the Romans: Dionysius has seen it, and walked on it a hundred times. Rome had now gained her seven hills, since the Viminal was first brought by that wall within the precincts of the city, which thus had a circumference of more than a German mile, like Athens after the Persian wars; a considerable town even for our days. We therefore see again how false is the opinion of Florus and others, who look upon the time of the kings, as being one of childhood (infans in cunis vagiens): on the contrary, after the expulsion of the kings Rome fell to a low ebb for a long time.

Well worth our attention is the Etruscan tradition concerning Servius Tullius, and the fragment of Claudius’ speech on the tablets at Lyons, which contains the notices of Cæles Vibenna and Mastarna from Etruscan historians.[81] I never was so much surprised by any literary discovery as by this. Not a soul had taken any heed of it before;—people don’t look at such square letters, especially when they are those of the silly Claudius. I at that time still believed in the Etruscan origin of Rome, and thought that quite a new light would thus be shed upon the whole of the Roman history. Cælius Vibenna must be an historical person: mention is made of him too frequently and too distinctly; his name also is such that the Romans could not have invented it, as the Etruscan language was as foreign to them, as the Celtic to us Germans. Nor is it perhaps to be doubted that he had a friend Mastarna. But when I search into the legislation which is ascribed to Servius Tullius,—whatever abatements may be made on the score of historical precision, especially with regard to chronology, although the fact is unquestionable that Servius reigned before the last king, and was overthrown by the thoroughly historical Tarquin the Proud,—this legislation was yet so peaceful and so free, that I cannot bring myself to believe that a condottiere, a captain of freebooters (for such were those enlisted troops) should have made such mild laws, and intended to change the monarchy into a republic. The whole civil and political legislation of Servius Tullius bears the impress of a thoroughly Latin stamp; the relation also to the Latins bespeaks a Latin lawgiver. He may have been a Corniculan, and have ascended the throne in a manner which was contrary to the established custom. He may have sprung from a marriage of disparagement between one of the Luceres with a woman of Corniculum before the connubium was conceded, and this may be at the bottom of the history of his descent; but a foreigner, or a leader of marauders, he certainly was not. I do not in the least doubt Claudius’ honesty, nor do I impugn the importance of the Etruscan books; yet we must not rate their value too high. What they really were could not be known before Mai discovered the Veronese Scholia on the Æneid (1818). In these are found quotations from two Etruscan historians, Flaccus and Cæcina, which considerably lower our expectations concerning the value of the Etruscan books for the early times. It seems that just as the Romans misunderstood the old Latin history, and substituted the Tyrrhenian one, thus also the Etruscans kept to the traditions of the Tyrrhenians whom they had brought under their yoke, and made Tarchon, him who plays his part in Virgil, and may be met with in the Roman tradition as Tarquinius Priscus, the founder of their empire from Tarquinii. If Claudius had really at hand the old Etruscan rolls written from right to left, of which Lucretius speaks, he was on very slippery ground; but how much more so, if he followed Flaccus and Cæcina, who wrote without any sort of criticism. The books of the Etruscans are for the most part dated too early. Etruria had from the war of Hannibal to that of Sylla, for more than a hundred years, enjoyed profound peace under the supremacy of the Romans; in this time most of the works of Etruscan literature must be placed. Before the Social War, as Cicero states, the sciences flourished all over Italy, of which we have no more any detailed knowledge; certainly histories were written in the whole of Italy, just as in Rome. Now if any one read in the Etruscan books Cæles Vibenna and Mastarna, and chose to put things together, he might have thought with some vanity, “what has become of this Mastarna? very likely he is that Servius Tullius, whose birth has been shrouded in mystery.” Somebody may thus have stumbled upon this idea quite by himself, and Claudius indeed, addle-headed as he was, was sure to believe such a thing. Thus he also says of the tribuni militares consulari potestate, “qui seni sæpe octoni crearentur.” But there have always either been six of these, half of whom were patricians and half plebeians, or promiscue; or else only three patricians, making four with the præfectus urbi: once only we know of eight, when the two censors were reckoned with them, as Onuphr. Panvinius has shown.[82] This may have happened once or twice besides; but at all events it was an anomaly. From this we see that Claudius did not understand the Fasti. Our notice of Mastarna therefore is according to all appearances based upon very slight authority. The Etruscan annals from which Claudius drew may have been old; but that they really were so, is nowhere stated.

The unity of the poem of the Tarquins from the arrival of Tarquinius Priscus to the fight at the Regillus cannot be mistaken,—a noble theme for an epic poet, much more worthy of being treated by Virgil than the Æneid. The account seems credible, and to have been derived from old traditions, that the legislation of Servius Tullius had to be carried through almost by force; that he arbitrarily formed his centuries; and then that these for the second time acknowledged him as king, and ratified his laws. All such changes among the ancients have been brought about in the same way. Moreover it is said that the patricians were angry at this legislation, although it took nothing from them, and merely gave something to the second order; and that they made attempts to murder the king, for which he compelled them to dwell, not on the Esquiline where his house stood, but in the valley below it. All this, as a tradition, has much probability from its intrinsic consistency. Yet the tragedy itself has its origin in the king’s own house. His two daughters, one of them good, the other wicked, are married to the two sons of Tarquinius Priscus; the good one to the younger L. Tarquin, a brave but ambitious young man, the wicked daughter to Aruns the elder brother. The latter saw that Aruns was disposed to give up his claims to the throne, and on this she offered L. Tarquin her hand to be gained by murdering her husband; he accepted it, and carried out her intentions. Tarquin, we are told, now formed a party among the patricians, and arranged with them for the murder of Servius Tullius; the king, when he made his appearance in the Curia, was flung down the steps, and the body guards dispatched him in the street; and Tullia went to greet her husband as king, and as she was returning drove over the corpse, owing to which the street got the name of vicus sceleratus.

That Servius lost his life in a rebellion of Tarquin, and that the latter was supported by the whole body of the citizens, in particular by the Luceres, his own party (factio regis, gentes minores), so that these reaped the fruits of the revolution, and the two first tribes thought themselves hardly dealt with, may be looked upon as historical. Yet I am far from considering as such all the details which are given about the daughters of the old king: they are no more so than the tale of Lady Macbeth. There is so wide a gulf between our manners and the crimes of the South, that we have not a notion of their possibility or impossibility; yet even if those accounts were possible, historical they are not. That the rule of Tarquin the Proud was brilliant but frightfully oppressive, and that he trampled the laws of Tullius under foot, may belong to history; but those appalling massacres of his cannot but be poetry. Tarquin has perhaps the misfortune of an awful poetical celebrity, much worse than he may have deserved. Yet he cannot have entirely abolished the laws of Servius at once. There may be some truth in the statement that he put down the meetings of the plebeian tribes; that he did away with their festivals; and that he did not call them together for legislation and the election of their magistrates. Nor, in fact, was there much occasion for these last, the criminal judges being chosen by the patricians. When it is recounted, that Tarquin undertook immense works, that he built the magnificent Capitoline temple, after having arranged the site for it, it is possible that he used the plebeians as his bondmen, that many of them committed suicide on that account, and that in order to prevent this he had the corpses fastened upon a cross. We must here proceed with caution and circumspection; the details will always remain uncertain, and all that cannot be set aside as impossible, is not therefore necessarily true. That Tarquin did not abolish the division into classes, seems to me certain; partly because it was advantageous for him to have the improved military organization, and partly because from the connection which he entered into with Latium, we are to conclude that the constitutions of the two states were the same; so that either Servius Tullius gave to the Romans a Latin constitution, or Tarquin to the Latins the Roman one. Even if Tarquin the Proud and his revolution in favour of the patricians, especially those of the third order, are quite historical, yet it is still singular that the third order should seem nevertheless after that revolution to have been inferior to the two others. This very fact, that the interests of the two first tribes clashed with those of the third, paved the way for a popular revolution.

According to Livy and Dionysius, the Latins, with the exception of Gabii, were induced to acknowledge the supremacy of Rome and of Tarquin; on the other hand, Cicero in the books De Republica says, universum Latium bello subegit. Whether this war was merely passed over by the others, or whether Cicero let fall the expression from carelessness only, cannot now be decided. It is probable that there have always existed discrepancies between the narrations of poetry and history: the tale of Turnus Herdonius has a highly poetical colouring. Whilst under Servius there was an alliance with reciprocity, Latium now entered into that relation in which afterwards the Socii Italici stood, when they bound themselves ad majestatem populi Romani comiter colendam. It seems also that the Latins, when there was a change of rulers at Rome, had refused to renew the alliance concluded under the late king.

In the alliance between Rome and Carthage, (of which the original treaty was kept among the archives of the ædiles, which also Polybius, as he states himself, not without a great deal of trouble, translated into Greek, since even the Romans themselves could hardly decypher and tell the meaning of the old writing; an alliance which was to be renewed from time to time, as in our days is still the case with those with the Barbary states,) we see the whole coast, not only of the Prisci Latini, but as far as Terracina, which at that time perhaps was still Tyrrhenian and not Volscian, in the possession of Rome; its inhabitants are called in the Greek translation ὑπήκοοι. Rome concludes the alliance for them as well as for herself; it is stipulated that, if the Carthaginians should make conquests in Latium, they were to give them up to the Romans. This treaty is as authentic as any thing can be: it is a strange whim of an otherwise estimable man,[83] to take it for an invention of Polybius. Here, therefore, Latium is still dependent on Rome, to which dependence Livy also bears witness: it was a relation newly established. Afterwards, when all as far as Antium rise up in hostility against Rome, we again recognise a decline of Roman power. The Feriæ Latinæ are an assembly of all the Latin nations, not merely of the Prisci Latini on the Alban Hill, where we know that the Latin authorities must needs have had the presidency. Yet Dionysius tells us that Tarquin had established the festival; that a bullock was killed, of which the delegates of the several towns each received a piece (carnem Latinis accipere). The Milanese Scholiast on Cicero’s oration for Plancius[84] says, that with regard to this there had been a different tradition; that some had ascribed the festival to Tarquinius Priscus,—this is a mere falsification for Tarquinius Superbus out of spite against the latter, just as the foundation of the Capitol was referred to the former king,—others to the Prisci Latini, which consequently would place it in the earliest times. The latter are perfectly right. The festivals existed long before Tarquin, as long as there was a Latin people. Yet, at the same time, the other opinion has arisen from a mistake which is very easily accounted for; for if Tarquin the Proud obtained the supremacy over Latium, he would also naturally preside at the sacrifices as the Ætolians did at Delphi during their hegemony, from whence the well known expression in the inscriptions, ἱερομνημονούντων Αἰτωλῶν.

In order to make a full use of Latium for his own ends, whilst yet he did not quite trust the Latins, he did not wish to admit their troops in distinct legions, under their own officers. He therefore combined the Roman with the Latin legions, and then divided these again into two parts. The Latins had a similar organization to that of the Romans: the system of centuries among the latter was based upon the thirty tribes, among the former upon the thirty towns. He united two centuries into a maniple, the Roman officer being primus centurio; as in the East Indian possessions of the English, the officers are exclusively Europeans.[85] Livy confounds the primus centurio with the primipilus. Here the maniples now first make their appearance; and this is the plain meaning of what Livy tells in a confused manner, but which may certainly be unravelled.

We are, however, not a little puzzled as to what we are to believe of the detached accounts. It is stated that Tarquin had established colonies at Signia and Circeii, and that he had taken Gabii by stratagem. The latter is false, and the accounts are compiled out of two in Herodotus of Zopyrus and of Thrasybulus of Miletus. Authentic is the alliance with Gabii, from which we see that Gabii was out of the union of the thirty towns, the relation with which had been already settled before. Still in the times of Horace, the original treaty, one of the few which had been preserved, was kept in a temple. It is clear from it, that Gabii had acquired isopolity by a formal compact.

THE REGIFUGIUM. ROME A REPUBLIC.

We may readily believe that Sextus Tarquinius committed the outrage against Lucretia, as indeed similar things happen even now in Turkey, and are told in the middle ages, of the Italian princes down to Pietro Luigi Farnese (in the sixteenth century), and in ancient history of Demetrius Poliorcetes at Athens. Cicero is quite right when he says that the misfortune was this, that the offence was committed against a matron of one of the most powerful families. To all the other details linked with it, from which the history derives its individuality, to the connexion with the campaign against Ardea, not the slightest credit is to be given. The king is said to have been in the camp before Ardea, and a truce to have been concluded there for fifteen years. Yet Ardea had already before been dependent upon Rome, and was one of those towns in the name of which she concluded the alliance with Carthage. Nothing, therefore, is likely to be true but the ill usage of Lucreia, and that her death kindled into a blaze the fire which had long been smouldering.

We are in just as much perplexity with regard to the character of Brutus. He is said to have feigned himself half-witted, concerning which there exist several accounts. The mission to Delphi with the sons of Tarquin, although such a one had already before been sent from Agylla, seems to betray a later hand, the same which put in the stories from Herodotus. It is said, moreover, that Tarquin, in order to render harmless the dignity of tribune of the Celeres, which was second only to that of the king, had conferred it upon Brutus. There is every likelihood, however, that the story of the stupidity of Brutus was merely derived from his name. Brutus is without doubt an Oscan word, the same which is in the name of the Bruttians; it means a run-away slave, a designation which the overbearing factio regis gave the leader of the rebels because he was a plebeian,—a case just like that of the Gueux. Is it conceivable that an eminent king should have made an utter fool (whom he might have put to death) tribune of the Celeres, in order to bring the dignity into contempt? Tarquin was not the kind of tyrant who was obliged to paralyze the state that he might rule over it; he could allow it strength, and yet govern it by the superior weight of his own personal qualities. Nor does the opinion which the Romans had of him incline that way; his statue remained in the Capitol together with those of the other kings.

A question which formerly much engaged my attention is this: How could Brutus, a plebeian, be Tribunus Celerum, although the Celeres were the patrician knights? I think I have found the key to it. Writers speak of him as if he had been the only tribune of the Celeres, whereas there were several of them, as Dionysius already mentions in the enumeration of the priestly offices in his account of Numa. The Celeres were the horsemen; yet the plebeians also had their knights, and these formed a fourth order. Now as each of the patrician tribes had its tribune, is it not according to analogy that among the thirty tribunes of the plebeians there was one who represented the plebeian Celeres as opposed to the patricians? The Magister Equitum, whose office is looked upon as a continuation of the dignity of the Tribunus Celerum, was not necessarily a patrician: P. Licinius Crassus was elected to it. This magistrate stood at the head of all the eighteen centuries of the knights, in which the plebeians had the preponderance. As a fourth estate the plebeians likewise appear in the remarkable adjustment of the estates, in the year of the city 388, when to the three holidays, which were kept at Rome corresponding to the three tribes, a fourth day was added; certainly because the plebeians now as a body were placed on an equal footing with the patricians, although not of such importance in the eyes of the latter, that three days should also be set apart for them.

To give the revolution the necessary sanction, it is said that Collatinus brought Brutus with him, and Sp. Lucretius Valerius. Now, we may positively assert, that Sp. Lucretius belonged to the Ramnes; Valerius, to the Tities;[86] Collatinus, to the Luceres; and as to Brutus, from what we have just seen, we may class him among the plebeians. That Valerius belonged to the Tities was generally acknowledged by the ancients: it is stated of him in Cicero, that he was consul together with Lucretius, to whom he yielded the Fasces, quia minor natu erat. Yet Cicero here confounds gentes minores with minor natu, the less privileged tribe being called minor. We know from Dionysius, that when the two first tribes were placed on an equal footing, the third was called νεώτεροι (minor). Collatinus was of the Gens of the Tarquinii, consequently a Lucer. Brutus is a plebeian; Cicero’s belief in the descent of the Junii Bruti from our L. Junius Brutus is beyond a doubt; and this is of greater weight than the denial of those who wrote after the battle of Philippi. M. Brutus was to be considered as a homo insitivus, as an outlaw. We already perceive from Posidonius that the question of the descent of the Bruti was mooted. Much may be said in support of the opinion of those who take him to be a patrician; certainly many patrician clans have survived in some plebeian families; a transitio ad plebem was made most frequently by unequal marriages, and although the cognomen was then generally wont to be a plebeian one, yet it might be surmised that such an illustrious name as that of Brutus had been retained. But as long as the consulship was not open to the plebeians, no Junius occurs among the consuls. In the earlier times of the republic a tribune of the people, one L. Brutus, is mentioned, who plays a prominent part as the framer of an important plebiscitum in the trial of Coriolanus (in Dionysius also, at the time of the secessio, which is a falsification). This Brutus is a real person; but just like the whole story of Coriolanus, he belongs to quite a different period.

If we reject from our account every thing which is purely dramatic, we see after Tarquin’s downfall four Tribunes of the Celeres in possession of the government, consequently a magistracy of four persons, Sp. Lucretius being at the same time Princeps Senatus and Valerius Præfectus Urbi. In Livy all goes on as in a stage play; the necessary historical development of the events is mistaken: some important hints are, however, to be found in Dionysius. These four men had no authority whatever to bring any resolution of their own before the citizens; the patricians could not decree anything, unless there had previously been a Senatus-Consultum as a προβούλευμα, as in all the Greek states, which Dionysius points out in several instances. This was the case in the curies as well as in the centuries: the first branch of the legislature which had an initiative were the Comitia Tributa, and it was this which made the lex Publilia so exceedingly important. So long as the senate could not take anything in hand but what was laid before it by the consul, nor the popular assembly without a decree of the senate, so long might the consuls stifle almost everything; they merely needed to keep a stubborn silence. In the case in question, it appears that the proposal for the abolition of the kingly dignity was not in a legal manner brought by the Tribuni Celerum before the curies; Livy has, however, for the sake of the composition, suppressed the old account contained in the law books. The tribunes of the celeres assembled, and resolved upon moving the abolition; the motion was by the Princeps Senatus brought to the senate; and the senate and the curies decide upon it. This is the lex curiata. With the intention now to restore the constitution of Servius in its integrity, the decision of the curies was also laid before the centuries for their approval, the order being a matter of little consequence. The way in which this is represented, is that the army in the camp of Ardea had assented to the resolution.

It is by no means certain that the consulship was instituted immediately after the expulsion of the kings. Rome was perhaps at first under the rule of the four Tribunes of the Celeres; perhaps also the government was at once rid of its superfluous number of heads, and they were reduced to two. This was certainly a deterioration; yet it may have been so ordered in Servius’ constitution with the definite purpose of securing the equalization of the commonalty, so that there might be one consul from the patricians, and one from the plebeians. In this case, of the first consuls Collatinus is the patrician and Brutus the plebeian one, unless perhaps there should yet happen to be a prior consulate of Sp. Lucretius and Valerius Poplicola.

The taking of Rome by the Gauls has not been fraught with more serious consequences to the city itself than it has been to its history, of which indeed all the sources have been obliterated by it. The chronicles of many places in their early histories afford a parallel to this. In Dittmarsch they begin about a hundred and fifty years before the conquest of the country, after the great change when the clans and the peasantry were formed into one organized body; an event which they do not mention, but presuppose. In like manner the chronicle of Cologne commences its notices long after that city was already great and flourishing. There were every where in the middle ages earlier written accounts; yet they were laid on the shelf, as they had no more any positive interest, after the particulars of the tradition had been buried in oblivion. Thus it was also with Roman history. They had it from the times of the republic, not, however, from its beginning, but only from about the period of the Secessio, merely with detached notices of the earlier times; before it they had nothing besides the peace with the Sabines during Sp. Cassius’ first consulate, and the war with the Volscians. All those earlier histories were, as we have already shown, restored in accordance with a numerical scheme.

I have already remarked that, when there were consuls of the two orders, Brutus represented the plebeians, as Sextius Lateranus did afterwards. It is very remarkable, that with regard to all these old institutions, it must indeed be asserted that the Licinian laws were in all essential points nothing else than restoration and re-enactment of those of Servius. The consuls were first called Prætores, στρατηγοί in Dionysius, until the Decemvirate, when their power was curtailed; and then the title of consul seems to have been introduced as being a somewhat more humble one. The derivation of this word has greatly troubled the Roman etymologists; we class it with præsul and exsul. Præsul means, he who is before (above) others; exsul, he who is out of the town; consul, he who is with another, equal to collega, whence consulere to be together in order to consult;—it has nothing to do with salire. Yet the being together of a patrician with a plebeian was not of long duration. It is stated that the expulsion of the Tarquinii was at first not at all followed by an embittered hostility, although an oath had been taken not to suffer kings any more to reign in Rome; so that it might almost appear doubtful whether the outrage against Lucretia had been really perpetrated. The ancients were often inconceivably mild with regard to such matters. It is possible that the influence of the royal race and of the third tribe were still so great, that they were obliged to grant the Tarquins in lieu of the hereditary rule the eligibility for the consulship. In Greek history also the royal races are dissolved into γένη ἀρχικά: the Codrids become archons, even those elected for ten years and certainly also at first those for one year were Codrids. Yet this did not last long. Collatinus was obliged to resign, and the whole of the Gens Tarquinia to leave the city. It may be that there was at that time a Tribus Tarquinia also, the memory of which was now obliterated. It seems shocking that Collatinus, the husband of Lucretia, was banished; if there were children of Lucretia living and they had to leave the country together with Collatinus, this was a revolting cruelty. Yet Lucretia’s marriage with Collatinus belongs to poetry only; neque affirmare neque refellere in animo est. She is the daughter of Sp. Lucretius Tricipitinus, and this is dwelt upon with much greater emphasis than her marriage. The intention of this probably was, to palliate the fact that the Tarquins were not absolutely driven out, and to explain the reason for which after all a cousin of the king had been made consul; and this could not be effected more easily than by connecting him with the legend of Lucretia.

The main point in the consulship was the limitation of the royal power to one year, election supplying the place of hereditary right. It was separated from the priestly functions, and received no τέμενος, what Cicero calls the agri lati uberesque regii, large demesnes which were cultivated by the clients for the kings. These agri were now divided among the commonalty in order that the restoration of the regal dignity might become impossible, and also that the consuls might not have the absolute sway of the kings. The power of these, like that of the Frankish kings, lay in their retinue. Clovis was not allowed to appropriate to himself any exclusive share in the booty, and yet he ruled already as a despot, and still more so his successors. This power he had merely by means of the comitatus. In the middle ages the tenant of the king had less consequence than the common freeman who had carefully preserved his independence. This state of things was only changed in the thirteenth century. Such royal tenants were those clients who cultivated the fields of the kings.

Was the consulate such that two patricians were to be elected, and there was no further limitation; or was it confined to the two first tribes, the Ramnes and Tities, to the exclusion of the Luceres, as in some of the priestly colleges; or was it a representation of the patricians and plebeians? These three probabilities lie before us. No one, moreover, was allowed to stand for the consulship in the earliest times: the candidates were proposed by the senate. The first of these cases is out of the question: were it not that the two first tribes, or the two estates were represented, a triumvirate would have much rather been thought of. The idea of the triumvirate was first taken up at a later period of the Roman history, a fact which was quite overlooked until I discovered the trace of it in an insignificant author, Joannes Lydus, who made use of excellent materials.

Of a plebeian consulship we find no more traces, down to the times of Licinius. In the place of Collatinus Horatius was elected, as may be proved from the treaty with Carthage, and by a passage of Pliny: in the common tradition, Valerius Poplicola is named as the successor of Collatinus. Thus we have these two statements placed side by side, one of which gives the lie to the other, and therefore we may freely have recourse to criticism, just as in the era of the kings. The events which happened under the kings, inasmuch as they fall within larger periods of time, could be extended or compressed; it is therefore quite a natural illusion to consider as better authenticated the subsequent times in which year by year is counted, and private persons only appear as the actors. Yet the age of uncertainty reaches much lower down. The poem, with which we have now to do, goes as far as the battle at the Regillus; in the legend of Coriolanus there again begins a distinct poem. In the Fasti there are the greatest discrepancies. In the first thirty years, there are wanting in Livy three pairs of consuls given by Dionysius. With regard to one of these, Livy seems to have found a gap in the Fasti: those copies which have not these gaps are interpolated. The two other pairs, Lartius and Herminius, are nothing more than subordinate characters which are mentioned along with the heroes. Men felt the necessity of enlarging the Fasti, because they did not suffice for the number which had been calculated; and so they forged consulships, not, however, laying hold of names at pleasure, but taking them from extinct houses and from second-rate heroes, and these they put in between the consulships of the Valerii, in order to disguise the fact of their series being unbroken. We have therefore free room for much conjecture upon other subjects also. Of the Horatii, we know from Dionysius that they belonged to the gentes minores, so that we have again one of the Luceres to supply the place of Collatinus; it is therefore my conjecture that alternate pairs, first one of the Ramnes and Tities, and then one of the Luceres and a plebeian, were set to preside over the state. Yet we cannot investigate this any further. Now if Valerius was not the colleague of Brutus, all that is told of him falls to the ground. Valerius Poplicola, it is stated, did not after the death of Brutus choose any successor at first. He is said to have built a stone house on the Velia. The temple of the Penates, falsely called the temple of Romulus, lies at the foot of a steep hill, the Velia: on the top, where the temples of Venus and of Roma and the arch of Titus stand, is summa Velia; the temple of Romulus is infima Velia. The people, or rather, the sovereign citizens, murmured at the building of that house of stone; on which Valerius had it pulled down during the night, and summoning the people, that is to say, the concilium of the curies, made his appearance accompanied by the lictors without the axes, and likewise had their fasces lowered before the concio. Hence the name Poplicola. Here also the populus is undoubtedly the patricians, the commonalty of the old citizens, from whom the consular power was derived. Such an homage before the plebeian commonalty would have been demagogical, and had this been the case, he must have been called Plebicola. This fine story cannot now be of any historical value for us; because according to the documents we have, Valerius could not certainly have been the only consul, tradition always mentioning Sp. Lucretius as his first colleague. The reason why he did not at once fill up the consulship, is said to have been his dread of the opposition of those who had equal claims. Sp. Lucretius occurs in some Fasti in the third year as consul instead of Horatius; but then there follows that unfortunate accommodation by which, in order that the father of Lucretia might not be passed over, his consulship is transferred from the third year into the first.

The Valerian laws are genuine; and it is on the whole a settled fact that the legislation of Servius was restored. The patricians, as Livy says, tried to gain over the plebeians; and Sallust also tells us, that as in the times immediately following the change the state had been governed by just laws and fairly, so it had afterwards been quite the reverse. The election of the consuls by the centuries is preserved from the ritual books, and therefore it is not absolutely certain. That the first law of the centuries was that Valerian one, by which to the Plebes was given the right of appeal to their commonalty, looks very authentic, but is not so. Perhaps it may be that the first elections were made by the Curies, as was unquestionably the case afterwards; yet the explicit tradition that the original condition of the Plebes was far more favourable than the later one, pleads against it.

Tarquin is said in the story to have betaken himself to Cære, and from thence to Tarquinii,—according to others, to Veii, to call upon the Veientines for aid. The emigration to Cære is nothing else but a personification of the “jus Cæritum exulandi,” this jus exulandi having always existed between Rome and those who were on terms of isopolity. The jus Cæritum is prominently mentioned in the old law-books, the reason for which seems to have been the flight of Tarquin. The version of the books is that he went to Cære; that of poetry that he went to Veii, and led the Veientines against Rome. The annalists finding both of these too mean, gave it out as most likely that he might have bent his steps to Tarquinii, where forsooth he must yet have had some relations. With regard to Cære, whither the royal family is said to have gone, there is no mention whatever of its having supported it in the war. Cicero, who had seen the genuine old Roman history, knows nothing of the participation of the people of Tarquinii in the Veientine war: he says in the Tusculan questions, that neither the Veientines nor the Latins had been able to bring back Tarquin. Purely mythical is the battle near the forest of Arsia, where Brutus and Aruns fall fighting, and the god Sylvanus loudly shouts forth the decision after 13,000 Etruscans, and one Roman less, had been stretched dead on the field of battle. Now that cannot be any thing but poetry.

Lars, or Lar[87] Porsena is an heroic name, as Heracles among the Greeks, Rustam among the Persians, Dietrich (Theodoric) of Berne, or Etzel (Attila) in the German epic lay. The principal characters of the heroic legends are blended with history, and their names are linked to events which have really happened. The war of Porsena belonged to those traditions which were most widely spread among the Romans, and it is represented as the second attempt of the Tarquinii to recover the throne: the Veientine war had not effected any thing, and after the death of Brutus it is no more spoken of. Cicero surely looked upon this war of Porsena in no other light than that of a Tuscan war of conquest. And undoubtedly the Romans were at that time engaged in a most destructive conflict with the Tuscans, in consequence of which they sank as low as any people can sink. From republican vanity this immediate result of an alteration in the constitution was thrown into the shade:—the Gallic conquest was just as dishonestly covered over. Of Porsena, the legend must have told a great deal. Thus a mausoleum of his at Clusium is mentioned, which Pliny quite innocently describes from Varro, who had it from Etruscan books. This account especially shakes my belief in the trustworthiness of the old Etruscan books, which to judge from this sample must have been tinged with an oriental colouring. It is a marvellous work, such as never has existed, and never could have existed,—like a fairy palace in the Arabian Nights. Pyramids stand in a circle, and are connected at the top by a brazen ring on which, of course in the intervals, other pyramids of huge base are standing; and so on in several stories, a pyramid of pyramids, which indeed could not have stood firm, but must needs have fallen to the ground, furnished too with bells, and other things of the same kind. It is inconceivable how Varro, and above all, how such a practical man as Pliny could have believed in day dreams like these: even a child may see that this is not possible. The impossibility is yet more confirmed by the fact that neither of them beheld any more traces of such a work, of which the ruins must have existed even to this day, as in Babylon those of the temple of Belus. Quatremere de Quincy has had the unfortunate idea of trying to restore this edifice in an architectural elevation. There may have been a historical Porsena who was made mythical, like our Siegfried, who was placed in quite a different time from the true one; or vice versa there was a mythical Porsena who was brought into history. We may safely deny the historical character of all that is told concerning this war: it has a thoroughly poetical appearance. How much this was the case, becomes evident when we view the tale in its simple form, stripped of the additions taken from the annalists. It is peculiar to all these poems, that they do not at all tally with other historical data.

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.

The Volscians are an Ausonian people, identical with Auruncians. They are said to have come from Campania; yet we know of the Auruncians in Campania that they were Ausonians: Aurunici and Ausonici are the same. Cora and Pometia, Latin colonies, are stated to have gone over to them. They must in that case have driven out the Latin colonists, or it was simply a conquest. This is a point which we cannot decide. But certain it is that the Auruncians were in possession of Cora and Pometia, and advanced as far as into Latium; perhaps they may have been defeated there by the Romans.

SECESSION OF THE PLEBES. LAW OF DEBTORS. INSTITUTION OF THE TRIBUNATE.

Sallust, who, like Thucydides, had prefixed to his history of the times after Sylla, which, alas! is lost, a succinct review of the moral and political history of his nation, preserved to us by St. Augustine, tells us in it, that no longer than the fear of Tarquin lasted, had Rome been governed with fairness and justice; but that, as soon as that fear had been removed, the Patres[89] had ventured upon every sort of arbitrary deeds, and from the severity of the law of usury the Plebes was kept under a yoke of slavery. Livy says likewise, that the Plebes was oppressed, cui summa opera inservitum erat until the ruin of the Tarquins. Until then, salt, which belonged to the publicum, had been sold at a low price; customs had been abolished; the demesnes of the kings had been distributed among the Plebes; and the φιλάνθρωπα δίκαια of Servius Tullius were again enforced. Finally, the old account states that Brutus had filled up the senate, qui imminutus erat, with plebeians. As he was the Tribunus Celerum of the plebeians, and afterwards plebeian consul, he may without doubt have admitted plebeians into the senate, although not in such considerable numbers as is asserted. But this did not last. Plebeian senators cannot have continued to the time of the legislation of the decemvirs; but from what Sallust says, who in the speech of Macer displays an uncommon acquaintance with the old constitution,—and St. Augustine, one of the greatest minds, a man endowed with the clearest penetration, believed him,—that the patricians soli in imperio habitabant, it is evident, that, when tranquillity was restored, they again excluded the plebeians. There are analogous cases in all states, precisely because it is in human nature. Without doubt the banished royal family had left a considerable party behind them, as is wont to happen in all revolutions; or a new one arose, which attached itself to the cause of the refugees, as was the case in the Italian towns of the middle ages. We may think what we like of the battle on the Regillus; we may deem the cohort of the Roman emigrants in the army of the Latins as improbable as it really is; yet we may with certainty believe in the existence of an emigration from Rome in a mass, linked to the royal fugitives, and always keeping up a connexion with the friendly party in the city,—like the φυγάδες in Greece, and as in English history, at the time of the great rebellion when the Stuarts were abroad, the Irish Papists and the Scotch Presbyterians, who were overpowered, and partly driven out of the country by Cromwell, joined the old cavaliers then living away from their homes with the royal family. The same was the case in the French revolution. As long as Tarquin, a man of personal eminence, was living abroad, the patricians hesitated to carry their innovations to extremities; yet they may have annoyed the plebeians; they may have deprived them of the imperia; they may even have expelled them from the senate;—at least they certainly did not fill up the places of those who died, with plebeians. Whenever in Switzerland danger threatened from abroad, the aristocratical cantons were mild to their country districts; otherwise they were harsh and cruel. Immediately after the English revolution of 1688, the liberties of the dissenters were far greater than they were twelve or fifteen years afterwards. What the plebeians lost, cannot be particularized. That the Valerian law of appeal to the tribes had been done away with is not likely; but it was no longer regarded, since it could only be upheld by impeaching the consul who had infringed it, when his year of office was expired: this the plebeian magistrates no more dared to do. Yet the real oppression only began when the fear of the foreigner was taken away.

Whether the law of debt had been changed by Servius Tullius, and Tarquin had abrogated the Servian laws, but Valerius had restored them, is a question with regard to which Dionysius is not to be implicitly believed. Tarquin is said to have utterly destroyed the tablets on which it was inscribed, that he might quite blot it out from the memory of men. This looks very suspicious: they needed only to have been copied once, and all that was done would be of no avail. We may however conclude from that statement that they were not contained in the jus Papirianum: the Plebes would have restored them after the Secession, if they had been deprived of a right so expressly granted. In this case, therefore, one of the plebeian forgeries seems to lie before us.

The law of debt produced a revolution. Had the senate and the patricians understood how to act wisely, and divided the opposite party, a thing so easily done in free states, the patricians were superior to the plebeians, not indeed in numbers, but in many other respects. For the patricians had almost exclusively the clientship. Livy and Dionysius have many passages from which it is evident how numerous the clients were during the first centuries; that the patricians distributed the demesne in many little hides of land among them; and that they kept them entirely in their power. These clients were not in the tribes; but they were connected through their patrons with the curies: hereditary landed property they only possessed by the special permission of their masters, what we would now call a quit rent. Thus they were absolutely dependent on the patricians. But the plebeians consisted of altogether different elements, of Latin knights, rich men, and a host of quite poor people: they were either proprietors or day-labourers. These different elements might very easily have been divided; the principal men were ambitious of offices and of political consideration; the common people, on the contrary, did not care at all whether their chiefs were admissible to consular dignity or not, but so much the more did they for other things. In the absence of patriotism and justice, the patricians must have been able easily to sever the mass from the principal plebeians. But they were as covetous as they were ambitious, and thus pressed doubly upon the people. The whole of the demesne was in their occupation. Had they assigned small possessions to the poor, or given them a right of ownership, then they would have gained them over; and separated them from the rest. Yet as they had the money trade entirely in their own hands, they deemed themselves sufficiently secure. The money trade no doubt was so managed, that the banking business was transacted by foreigners or freedmen under the patronage of a patrician, as in Athens by Pasion, who was a Metic, and paid an Athenian for lending his name to the firm.[90] As in Athens the Trapezitæ, in medieval Italy the Lombards, in our days the Jews, all of whom have no real home, carry on the money trade. And thus the poor plebeian often applied for loans to his neighbour, yet more generally he was obliged to go to town, and to fetch the money from the Trapezitæ.

The expression persona in law is derived from the fact that a foreigner could not appear in court. It is a mask: another had to represent him. That the peregrinus afterwards could himself sue and be sued, and that a special prætor peregrinus was appointed, was not done on account of the vast amount of business, but for political reasons. The patricians themselves would not have possessed such great moneyed resources: yet the foreigners who came to Rome had to commit themselves to their patronage, the same as the clients, for which, of course, the patrician was paid a commission. Now and then perhaps the patricians may have done business on their own account. Taken in this point of view, it was not after all such a sordid usury as is generally presumed.

The patricians and plebeians had quite different civil rights, as they had come together out of different states: the twelve tables, besides settling the political groundwork, first introduced one uniform civil law. Among our (German) forefathers also, there was not a geographical, but a personal distinction of rights. In Italy, the homebred population down to the twelfth century had Roman, whilst the German had Lombard and Salic law; but when the old municipalities were abolished and the elements of society were in the process of amalgamation, people first began to issue their decrees in common, they weaned themselves more and more from the old native institutions, and thus by degrees arose the statute law of the Italian towns, such as every city possesses. The patricians had a liberal law of debt, the plebeians a strict one; they had it also among themselves, but to them it only became dangerous as far as it was between them and the patricians. As soon as it is possible to run into debt, the number of small proprietors decreases from century to century. If we compare the division of the land at Tivoli in the fifteenth century with the present one, we see that at that time there were fifty times more owners of the soil than there are now.

The general law of debt, as it is found in the East, among the Greeks, among the northern nations, as well as among the Romans, is this, that the borrower could pledge himself and his family for the debt. According to Plutarch, in his life of Solon, there were at Athens nearly a thousand bondmen for debt, who, if they were not able to pay, were sold to the foreigner. Among the Romans personal arrest existed in its sternest form. People either liquidated their debts by personal servitude, or else they alienated their property for a certain time, or in case of severe distress for life, or else they also sold themselves,—by which likewise the children, who were still in patria potestate, came per æs et libram into the mancipium of the buyer,—yet with the condition that they might be redeemed. This bondage lasted until they emancipated themselves again per æs et libram. Our personal arrest of insolvent debtors is the still remaining half of this ancient right, which ceases to have any meaning, owing to the other half having been done away with by milder manners. The German also could in olden times give up his freehold and his person to another, whose bondman he then became. In order to escape the addiction, the borrower could eventually sell his property as a security; yet he was bound in conscience to redeem it after a certain time. The Fides answered for it that the creditor also would not withhold from the debtor the opportunity of redeeming himself, even when his person and his family were concerned. For this reason the Fides was a goddess of such importance among the Romans: as under such strict forms of law, people would have utterly been ruined without her. If a debtor did not discharge his debt, he was forfeited to his creditor, being fiduciarius in his mancipium; yet the latter could not directly manum injicere, an addiction of the prætor being wanted for that purpose. He had to in jure vindicare him with the words, Hunc ego hominem meum esse aio ex jure Quiritium; and without doubt the five witnesses and the libripens, before whom the contract had been concluded, were to be present. The prætor then gave a respite; and if after its expiration payment was not made, and the debtor therefore was not able to prove the liberatio per æs et libram, the ὑπερήμενος was addicted to the creditor. In the old Attic law, it was just the same; yet Solon had without doubt abolished it, and introduced in its stead the Attic law of mortgage, from which the later Roman one is derived. For the equites in their important money transactions tried to evade the strict debtor’s law, by causing them to be managed by foreigners who were not subject to the Roman laws. Thence arose the laws concerning the chirographa and centesima, a discount business for so short a date was not done in Rome at all. The Addictus was termed nexus, because of his being nexu vinctus. Nexus, or nexum every transaction was originally called, which by traditio and by weighing out of money was done in the presence of witnesses, a thing afterwards usual only in fictitious sales, and then significative of a right of mortgage, by which in case of neglect of payment a definite right of property was secured to the creditor. Frequently also people were allowed to discharge their debt by work. An industrious workman might advantageously dispose of his labour in times when there was a great demand for it; if, for instance, a man, who had pledged himself, had a son who was still in his full strength; the father sold him to the creditor; and when the son had discharged the debt by his work, he became again free of the mancipium of his master. Yet the interest accumulated at such a usurious rate, that it became very difficult for a debtor who was poor to redeem himself; though, if he worked as a nexus, he at least paid the interest. During such a period of labour the master had full authority over him as over a slave. That those who thus worked in payment of debts were a numerous class, is expressly asserted by writers.

But there was yet another way in which bondage for debt arose. One might also become a debtor without contract; as for instance, by neglecting to pay a legacy, or should a tradesman work for me, and I do not pay him; and again, if I commit a crime, I am bound in Roman law to make amends to the injured party according to a fixed estimate, obligatio ex delicto. All these relations constitute a second class of liabilities, and in these cases there was addiction without nexus, as was laid down in the twelve tables. The prætor sentences the thief to give me double what he has stolen; and if the man does not pay it by the appointed day, he addicts him to me as a bondman for debt. In the same manner, if I sue any one for a purchase and he cannot deny the debt (æs confessum), I demand his addictio for a certain time. This was a vinculum fidei, an intimidation, so that the debtor, of course, strained every nerve to pay. To this only did the expression vinculum fidei refer, not to the nexum; as vindication was here allowed, and there was no question about the fulfilment of a contract. When a Roman was in nexu, having sold himself to another in the event of his not paying, as the Merchant of Venice did to Shylock, he had to pay the taxes on his freehold all the same, however heavily incumbered it might be; for nexo solutoque idem jus esto, was the law of the twelve tables. But quite different is the case of the addictus, who is the creditor’s own, and has no personal rights. Thus we have the solution of the enigma in the accounts given in our books, that debtors who had sold themselves (that is to say, nexi) served notwithstanding in the legions.[91] Livy does not enter into this subject, because he was not conscious of the difficulty: Dionysius indeed remarks it, but he is embarrassed by it.

In a certain measure, this system was just as necessary as our strict rules of exchange; yet its abuse was unavoidable, as the rich man is not always kind-hearted, but is often harsh, and will abide by the law in its utmost rigour. This idolizing of mammon reigned in Rome, and the tyranny of positive law was often very oppressive. Besides which, the right was all on one side. When a patrician got into difficulties, his kinsmen or dependants had to get him out of them; the plebeians were forced in most cases to borrow money from the patricians. Now the fate of an addicted plebeian was one in which there might be much variety. He might find a mild master who allowed him to buy his freedom by work, or else a hard one who would shut him up in the ergastulum, put him in chains, and treat him cruelly, that his friends might be obliged to pay for his release.