The Historians' History of the World 05

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.