The Historians' History of the World 05

As to the descent of the Luceres, nothing can be said except that there is no obstacle to their being regarded as a Latin tribe like the Ramnes. On the other hand the second of these tribes is unanimously derived from that of the Sabines, doubtless on the authority of a respectable and authentic tradition of the “Titian brotherhood” which claimed to have been founded on the admission of the tribe to the confederacy for the preservation of its peculiar national ritual. Traces of such an aboriginal Sabine worship are in fact to be found in Rome; as for instance the honouring of Maurs or Mars and of Semo Sancus, side by side with the corresponding Latin Dius Fidius. It was at a very remote period, when the Latin and Sabine tribes were yet unquestionably far less distinctly unlike in language and customs than were the Roman and the Samnite later, that a Sabellian community entered into a Latin tribal union; exactly in the same way that some centuries afterwards the Sabine clan of Attus Clanzus, or Appius Claudius, and his clients emigrated to Rome, obtained a grant of land on the right bank of the Anio and was soon completely absorbed into the Roman community.

Death of Remus

(From a picture by Mirys)

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.