The History of Rome

The names of the men, at whose bidding these great buildings of the city arose, are almost as completely lost in oblivion as those of the leaders in the earliest battles and victories of Rome. Tradition indeed assigns the different works to different kings - the senate-house to Tullus Hostilius, the Janiculum and the wooden bridge to Ancus Marcius, the great Cloaca, the Circus, and the temple of Jupiter to the elder Tarquinius, the temple of Diana and the ring-wall to Servius Tullius. Some of these statements may perhaps be correct; and it is apparently not the result of accident that the building of the new ring-wall is associated both as to date and author with the new organization of the army, which in fact bore special reference to the regular defence of the city walls. But upon the whole we must be content to learn from this tradition - what is indeed evident of itself - that this second creation of Rome stood in intimate connection with the commencement of her hegemony over Latium and with the remodelling of her burgess-army, and that, while it originated in one and the same great conception, its execution was not the work either of a single man or of a single generation. It is impossible to doubt that Hellenic influences exercised a powerful effect on this remodelling of the Roman community, but it is equally impossible to demonstrate the mode or the degree of their operation. It has already been observed that the Servian military constitution is essentially of an Hellenic type[17]; and it will be afterwards shown that the games of the Circus were organized on an Hellenic model. The new -regia-with the city hearth was quite a Greek prytaneion, and the round temple of Vesta, looking towards the east and not so much as consecrated by the augurs, was constructed in no respect according to Italian, but wholly in accordance with Hellenic, ritual.  With these facts before us, the statement of tradition appears not at all incredible that the Ionian confederacy in Asia Minor to some extent served as a model for the Romano-Latin league, and that the new federal sanctuary on the Aventine was for that reason constructed in imitation of the Artemision at Ephesus.

CHAPTER VIII The Umbro-Sabellian Stocks - Beginnings of the Samnites

Umbro-Sabellian Migration