Death of Remus
(From a picture by Mirys)
A fusion of various nationalities did of course take place; but we are not therefore justified in counting the Romans amongst mixed peoples. With the exception of isolated national institutions transplanted into the ritual, the existence of Sabellian elements is never manifested in Rome, and in especial the Latin tongue affords no support to such an hypothesis. It would indeed be more than surprising if the addition to the Latin nation of a single tribe from one of the races nearest allied to the Latin, had affected its nationality in perceptible fashion; and in addition it must by no means be forgotten that, at the time when the Tities settled near the Romans, the Latin nationality had its headquarters at Latium, not at Rome. The new threefold Roman commonwealth was, in spite of its quickly assimilated Sabellian element, just what the tribe of the Ramnes had been—a part of the Latin nation.
Long before an urban settlement rose on the Tiber, those Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres may have had their township on the Roman hills and tilled their fields from the surrounding villages, at first separately and afterwards in concert. The festival of the wolf, lupercalia, which the family of Quinctii celebrated on the Palatine Hill, may be a tradition of this earliest time; it was a festival of peasants and shepherds which preserves the homely sports of patriarchal simplicity in a way equalled by none other, and remarkably enough was the one of all the heathen festivals which survived for a time in Christian Rome.
From these settlements, then, sprang the later Rome. Of the actual foundation of the town as the legend relates it, we cannot of course in any sense speak; Rome was not built in a day. It is, however, well worth considering by what means Rome could have attained to her eminent political position in Latium, when the nature of the locality would rather lead us to an opposite expectation. The site on which Rome stands is less healthy and less fertile than that of most old Latin towns. The vine and the fig tree do not thrive in the immediate neighbourhood of Rome, and there is a lack of bountiful springs—for neither the excellent fount of Camenæ before the Porta Capena, nor the Capitoline well, afterwards enclosed in the Tullianum, yields much water. To all this was added the frequent overflowing of the river, which, owing to its very slight incline, was unable during the rainy season to carry seaward the copious influx from the mountain streams with speed enough to prevent its flooding the valleys and low tracts of land which opened between the hills, and reducing them to a mere marsh. The place is by no means alluring to the settler and even in ancient times it was said that it could not have been its fitness for colonisation which attracted the first immigrant farmers to that unhealthy and infertile spot in a favoured district; but that necessity, or rather some other very special reason, must have prompted the building of the town.
The strangeness of the choice is acknowledged even in the legend; the tale of the foundation of Rome by refugees from Alba, under the leadership of the Albanian princes Romulus and Remus, is nothing but a naïve attempt of early quasi-history to explain the strangeness of the establishment of the city on so unfavourable a site, and at the same time to connect the origin of Rome with the common metropolis of Latium. It is especially from such fairy tales which purport to be history and are nothing but inventions made on the spur of the moment and not particularly clever, that serious history has to disencumber itself; but perhaps it is permissible to go a step further, and after considering the special features of the neighbourhood, to advance a positive theory, not as to the origin of the place, but as to the cause of its swift and astonishing prosperity and of its peculiar position in Latium.
Let us look first at the ancient boundaries of the Roman territory. To the east the towns of Antemnæ, Fidenæ, Cænina, Collatia, and Gabii lie in the near neighbourhood, some of them not five miles distant from the gates of Servian Rome; the boundary of the province must consequently have been hard by the city gates. Fourteen miles to the south we come on the powerful communities of Tusculum and Alba, and here the Roman territory seems not to have extended farther than to the Fossa Cluilia, five miles from Rome. Similarly, in the southwesterly direction, the boundary between Rome and Lavinium was already encountered at the sixth milestone.
Whilst on the land side the Roman province was everywhere confined to the narrowest possible limits, on the other hand, from the earliest times it stretched uninterruptedly along both banks of the Tiber in the direction of the sea; and no place representing an ancient provincial centre nor any sort of trace of an ancient provincial border is encountered between Rome and the coast. It is true that legend, which can assign an origin for everything, is here also able to inform us that the Roman possessions on the right bank of the Tiber, the “seven hamlets” (septem pagi), and the important salt-works at its mouth were taken by King Romulus from the Veientes, and that King Ancus fortified the tête de pont, the “Mount of Janus” (Janiculum), on the right bank of the Tiber, and on the left laid the foundation of the Roman Piræus, the harbour town at the “mouth” (ostia) of the river. But on the other hand the fact that the possessions on the Etruscan bank must have belonged to the very earliest Roman territory is attested by a better witness, namely by the grove of the creative goddess (Dea Dia) which stood in this very place, at the fourth milestone of the road subsequently made to the harbour, and was the original high place of the Roman Arval festival and Arval brotherhood. Indeed, from time immemorial, the clan of the Romilii, probably the most distinguished among all the Roman clans, had its seat here; the Janiculum was a part of the town itself and Ostia a citizen colony, that is, a suburb. This cannot have been mere chance. The Tiber was the natural highway of Latium, and its mouth, on a coast so poorly provided with harbours, was the necessary place of anchorage for ships.
Moreover, the Tiber formed, from the earliest times, the frontier defence of the Latin stock against their northern neighbours. No place is better qualified than Rome to be both the entrepôt of the Latin river and sea commerce and the frontier fortress of Latium. She combined the advantages of a strong position and the immediate neighbourhood of the river; she commanded both banks of the stream down to its mouth; she was equally convenient for the river-ships descending the Tiber or the Anio or, in those days of moderate-sized vessels, for those designed for the sea; and she afforded better protection against pirates than the towns lying immediately on the coast. That it was to these commercial and strategical advantages that Rome owed, if not her origin, at least her importance, numerous proofs are forthcoming, which are of far greater importance than the data furnished by historical romances. With these are connected her early relations with Cære, which was to Etruria what Rome was to Latium, and consequently became the city’s closest neighbour and commercial ally; thence came the extraordinary importance of the bridges over the Tiber, and of bridge building generally in the Roman commonwealth, and hence the galley in the city arms.