Beyond this there was a settlement on the Carinæ, the farthest summit of the Esquiline, with the fortress for defence against the Sabines in the valley of the Subura; this afterwards became the second Servian quarter. At that time the Esquiliæ (which did not properly speaking include the Carinæ) formed, as the name signifies, a suburb (exquiliæ, the same as inquilinus). That the town should have extended itself in this direction is explained by the simple fact that the people remained on the heights, especially on the Palatine and the Velian, avoiding both the isolated hills and the swampy and wholly defenceless valleys which lay between. At a later time the suburb was included in the town, and under the Servian division it became the third quarter.
The “bridge of piles” (pons sublicius) thrown across that natural pier, the island in the Tiber, and the tête de pont on the Etruscan shore, the citadel of the Janiculum, remained outside the fortifications of the “Seven Hills.” And as, for military reasons, it was necessary to be able to break down or burn the bridge at the shortest notice, there arose a fixed rule which down to a very late period was observed as a traditional religious law, that no iron could be used in the construction of the bridge, but only wood. Thus a town came into being, but nevertheless the real and complete amalgamation of the various bodies which formed the settlement was not yet effected. As there was no common city altar, but the separate altars of the different curies merely stood side by side in the same neighbourhood, so not only did the distinction between citadel and town continue, but the seven circles themselves were rather a collection of urban settlements than a united town until the gigantic defensive works, ascribed to King Servius Tullius, surrounded the inner and outer city and the open suburbs with a single great wall. But before these strong works were set in hand, the position of Rome in relation to the surrounding district had doubtless entirely changed.
As the primitive uncommercial and inactive epoch of the Latin stock corresponds to the period in which the husbandman drove the plough on the Palatine as well as over the other hills of Latium, and the place of refuge on the Capitol, which in ordinary times stood empty, presented only the commencement of a fortified settlement; and as later the flourishing settlement on the Palatine and within the seven circles coincides with the occupation of the estuary of the Tiber by a Roman community and generally with the progress of the Latins to a free and active intercourse, and urban civilisation especially in Rome, and indeed to a firmer political consolidation both of the separate states and of the confederacy; so does the establishment of a single great city by means of the Servian rampart belong to that epoch in which the city of Rome was enabled to contend for the supremacy of the Latin confederacy and finally to get the upper hand.c
FOOTNOTES
[2] [The decisive overthrow of the Etruscans was achieved by Hiero, his successor, in a battle fought off Cumæ in 474.]
[3] [Meyerd thinks it probable that the Roman (like the four Ionic) tribes were an artificial division patterned after a pre-existing ethnic scheme.]
CHAPTER II. EARLY LEGENDS OF ROME—ÆNEAS AND ROMULUS
It is not easy to determine between either the facts or the writers, which of them deserves the preference: I am inclined to think that history has been much corrupted by means of funeral panegyrics and false inscriptions on statues; each family striving by false representations to appropriate to itself the fame of warlike exploits and public honours. From this cause, certainly, both the actions of individuals and the public records of events have been confused. Nor is there extant any writer, contemporary with those events, on whose authority we can certainly rely.—Livy.
According to the legends immortalised by Virgilf if not by Livy,c Æneas, escaping from Troy, after its destruction by the Greeks (as narrated in the Homeric poems), fled to Italy, and there became the progenitor of the people afterwards to be known as the Romans. So firmly stamped did this legend become in classical literature that few or no writers share even Livy’s polite scepticism. For many centuries after the Roman Empire itself had passed away, the fabulous stories of the foundation of Rome were repeated by one generation after another of historians, as unequivocal fact.
It was only about a century ago, in an age of scepticism, that an iconoclastic critic arose to lay rude hands upon the time-honoured stories. This critic was the German Niebuhr.e He analysed legends not alone of the foundation, but of the supposed early history of Rome, and reached the indubitable conclusion that the familiar stories of early Roman kings and heroes were little better than pure fictions.
The work which Niebuhr began has been carried on by a school of successors, until it must be said that the entire fabric of once-accepted early Roman history has been torn into shreds. And in its place has been substituted—practically nothing. It is true that Niebuhr himself, iconoclast that he was, could not free himself from that hypothesis-forming tendency which is the heritage of all active minds, and put forward many prosaic guesses at the truth as substitutes for the old-time poetical guesses which he had dethroned. But these latter-day hypotheses, though accepted for the moment by many disciples of the master historian, have been treated with far scanter courtesy by the newer generation of critics, many of whom, however, have in turn supplied their own surmises. The net result of all the researches of the past century, and of all the surmises with which these researches have been supplemented, is to leave us practically without any acceptable hypothesis, except perhaps a meagre though consistent outline of institutional and civic development.
And scarcely less vague are the outlines of the story of the early growth of Rome, and of its internal government and external accomplishments during some centuries of its undoubted existence. That it was ruled in the early days by kings, has been accepted on the basis of universal tradition, but it can scarcely be said that any one of these kings is to be regarded to-day as a known historic personage. We are not even sure as to the time when the kings were banished and a republican form of government supplanted the monarchy, though the accepted dates ascribe this transition to the year 509 B.C.—which, curiously enough, was the time of the banishment of the Pisistratidæ from Athens. If this date be accepted, it would seem that the evolution of political ideas in Greece was curiously paralleled by the growth of the same spirit in Rome, and it would follow that the civilisations of the two peoples were more closely contemporaneous than they are usually considered to have been.
But the true fruitage of a nation is found in the permanent works which it transmits to posterity, and judged by this standard Rome surely did not come to its prime until Greece was on the path of its decadence. It may be true that Rome banished her kings and came under republican sway almost as early as Athens; but the Greek city had had a far longer preparation and burst at once into its full bloom of civilisation, as evidenced in the “Age of Pericles,” whereas the Roman civilisation had still to pass through many generations of development before it began to produce those lasting records which mark the difference between tradition and history. Even so, however, the gap in time between the Grecian and the Roman periods was not very great—there were but three centuries between Alexander and Cæsar. And in the time of the later emperors the two civilisations were curiously merged in the East, where the whole aspect of the Roman court became Grecian, and the Greek language even became the official medium of communication throughout the remnants of the Roman Empire.