The History of Rome. Book II

But as the first steps towards writing real history belonged to this period, to it belonged also the first attempts to record, and conventionally distort, the primitive history of Rome. The sources whence it was formed were of course the same as they are everywhere. Isolated names like those of the kings Numa, Ancus, Tullus, to whom the clan-names were probably only assigned subsequently, and isolated facts, such as the conquest of the Latins by king Tarquinius and the expulsion of the Tarquinian royal house, may have continued to live in true general tradition orally transmitted. Further materials were furnished by the traditions of the patrician clans, such as the various tales that relate to the Fabii.  Other tales gave a symbolic and historic shape to primitive national institutions, especially setting forth with great vividness the origin of rules of law. The sacredness of the walls was thus illustrated in the tale of the death of Remus, the abolition of blood-revenge in the tale of the end of king Tatius, the necessity of the arrangement as to the -pons sublicius- in the legend of Horatius Cocles[15], the origin of the -provocatio- in the beautiful tale of the Horatii and Curiatii, the origin of manumission and of the burgess-rights of freedmen in the tale of the Tarquinian conspiracy and the slave Vindicius. To the same class belongs the history of the foundation of the city itself, which was designed to connect the origin of Rome with Latium and with Alba, the general metropolis of the Latins. Historical glosses were annexed to the surnames of distinguished Romans; that of Publius Valerius the "servant of the people" (Poplicola), for instance, gathered around it a whole group of such anecdotes. Above all, the sacred fig-tree and other spots and notable objects in the city were associated with a great multitude of sextons' tales of the same nature as those out of which, upwards of a thousand years afterwards, there grew up on the same ground the Mirabilia Urbis. Some attempts to link together these different tales - the adjustment of the series of the seven kings, the setting down of the duration of the monarchy at 240 years in all, which was undoubtedly based on a calculation of the length of generations[16], and even the commencement of an official record of these assumed facts - probably took place already in this epoch. The outlines of the narrative, and in particular its quasi-chronology, make their appearance in the later tradition so unalterably fixed, that for that very reason the fixing of them must be placed not in, but previous to, the literary epoch of Rome. If a bronze casting of the twins Romulus and Remus sucking the teats of the she-wolf was already placed beside the sacred fig-tree in 458, the Romans who subdued Latium and Samnium must have heard the history of the origin of their ancestral city in a form not greatly differing from what we read in Livy. Even the Aborigines - i. e. "those from the very beginning" - that simple rudimental form of historical speculation as to the Latin race - are met with about 465 in the Sicilian author Callias. It is of the very nature of a chronicle that it should attach prehistoric speculation to history and endeavour to go back, if not to the origin of heaven and earth, at least to the origin of the community; and there is express testimony that the table of the pontifices specified the year of the foundation of Rome. Accordingly it may be assumed that, when the pontifical college in the first half of the fifth century proceeded to substitute for the former scanty records - ordinarily, doubtless, confined to the names of the magistrates - the scheme of a formal yearly chronicle, it also added what was wanting at the beginning, the history of the kings of Rome and of their fall, and, by placing the institution of the republic on the day of the consecration of the Capitoline temple, the 13th of Sept. 245, furnished a semblance of connection between the dateless and the annalistic narrative. That in this earliest record of the origin of Rome the hand of Hellenism was at work, can scarcely be doubted. The speculations as to the primitive and subsequent population, as to the priority of pastoral life over agriculture, and the transformation of the man Romulus into the god Quirinus[17], have quite a Greek aspect, and even the obscuring of the genuinely national forms of the pious Numa and the wise Egeria by the admixture of alien elements of Pythagorean primitive wisdom appears by no means to be one of the most recent ingredients in the Roman prehistoric annals. The pedigrees of the noble clans were completed in a manner analogous to these origines of the community, and were, in the favourite style of heraldry, universally traced back to illustrious ancestors. The Aemilii, for instance, Calpurnii, Pinarii, and Pomponii professed to be descended from the four sons of Numa, Mamercus, Calpus, Pinus, and Pompo; and the Aemilii, yet further, from Mamercus, the son of Pythagoras, who was named the "winning speaker" (aimulos) But, notwithstanding the Hellenic reminiscences that are everywhere apparent, these prehistoric annals of the community and of the leading houses may be designated at least relatively as national, partly because they originated in Rome, partly because they tended primarily to form links of connection not between Rome and Greece, but between Rome and Latium.